Railroaded

The New York City subway system stretches over 800 miles and carries billions of riders every day. While many have written about this legendary public transit system, a century of published books says little about the subway as a workplace. Older books describe railroad lines and equipment and newer ones transit unions and building projects. None of this subway literature, however, portrays the motormen operating the trains and the porters cleaning over 400 stations. Railroaded describes these jobs, which the author, Fred Naiden, an award-winning Harvard-trained historian, held in the 1980s before beginning a successful second career in academia. His academic training enabled him to make comparisons between transit work today and in the past, beginning with horsecars and elevated trains. Naiden's colorful and at times dangerous tenure as a subway station cleaner, a motorman, and a locomotive engineer-including his work as a union shop steward-all serve as a backdrop to his deep involvement in the NYC labor movement, including his life in a tenement in what was then a blue-collar neighborhood. Railroaded will appeal to both urban historians and to a general public interested in the fate of one of the biggest pieces of declining infrastructure in the United States. It will also appeal to labor historians and to readers of memoirs by American workers. This is the story of Naiden's tenure as NYCTA employee #4046.