If you’re on your way to the New York Transit Museum and you’re looking up for the entrance, you might miss it. That would be because the museum isn’t in a building. It’s below ground—in a real subway station. This 1936 IND subway station was at the western end of a shuttle service to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street station, the HH line. It was supposed to be part of a Fulton Street Line that would have connected to stations in Manhattan , but the line was never built. After limited use, it was closed in 1946 and used as a storage space for 30 years. The MTA then began to use the station as a place to train new subway employees and shoot subway scenes for movies, fashion, and video (The Taking of Pelham 123), before finally converting it into a museum. With its live third rail, the abandoned station is ideal for such projects and for showcasing a variety of subway cars from subway history. Newly renovated, this place is state of the art now.

As you descend into the station you’ll buy your ticket at an original ticket booth before turning left into “Steel, Stone, and Backbone,” where you learn about how the subways were built. Photographs and text panels show you how New

You continue past turnstiles that span from the opening of the very first subway to the present. The earliest ones cost only $0.05. If the price increases at the same rate as in the past century, 100 years from now, a subway ride will cost more than $60. It wasn’t until the fare was raised to 15 cents in 1953 that the token was introduced, eliminating the need to use multiple coins. An immediate hit with the public, tokens have been made in a series of different sizes, shapes, and designs – and the turnstiles that accepted these tokens have also changed in design over the years.

How about some more random MTA trivia? What entities besides the bus and subway are part of the MTA, and what does MTA stand for? Well, MTA stands for Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and it also includes the city’s bridges and tunnels, the Metro-North Railroad, the Long Island Rail Road, Long Island Bus, and Staten Island Railway. And that’s why you won’t be surprised to find the huge console from the Triborough Bridge, which was how the bridge opened and closed to allow passage for ships beneath it. This relic was so good it was used all the way until 1998, when it was finally replaced with newer technology. If you look around you can find some odd, equally cool random pieces of furniture in the museum, like a ticket chopper and an old potbellied stove that was, at one point, used to heat the stations.

Okay, trivia continued: We call them subway trains, but where were the first trains mainly used? Not underground. They were known as “els,” and you can learn all about them in the “ElevatedCity” exhibit. The “els” were cheaper to build than subways but they also had their drawbacks. The coal-run locomotives dirtied the air; the hot coal embers regularly fell on the street below, injuring pedestrians; and ice completely shut down the trains.

Before subways, even before the els, buses and trolleys were the city’s public transit system. You can learn all about their history in the exhibit “On the Streets,” where a life-size street scene is reconstructed. You’ll find a timeline of the history of surface transit in New York, starting in 1810. Several life size pictures of MTA employees talk about what they do when you push a large yellow button. In one bus you can try out the seats while watching a short video about New York’s historic buses and trolleys.

An entire corner, the Dr. George T. F. Rahilly Trolley and Bus Study Center, is surrounded by tons of models of train and subway cars. Dr. Rahilly, a Brooklyn dentist, made them all. He was so upset when trains were taken out of service that he made scaled models of them—in fact, of every trolley or subway car ever used in Brooklyn. You’ll also see real maps from each borough, used by controllers at subway and bus command centers, as well as a teletype machine, which bus command centers used to communicate activity and emergency reports to receivers in the depots until 1984.

Although it’s aimed at younger kids, you should walk through the museum’s “Cleaning the Air” exhibit on pollution and public transit, including the MTA’s new measures for minimizing it. My favorite part was about the new hybrid electric buses, which recharge by converting the heat they generate into energy.

You should also definitely check out the Sanford Gaster Education Center. Workshops on weekends allow you to create a mosaic, pen some Poetry in Motion or even design subway-inspired jewelry!

Walk down to the lower level to see a platform with several subway cars dating from the opening of the subway in 1904 to 1969. Each car has a plaque on it with information about the car and its date of service. For one thing, over time different subway lines were owned by different companies. The banker August Belmont started the first, the IRT. The BRT or Brooklyn Rapid Transit became involved in expanding the subway about ten years later, setting up new lines in Brooklyn. The IND or Independent Subway Line then came on the scene in the 1930s, giving the other lines some competition, but the three finally found some peace and unity in 1940 when the city took control.

Be sure to look at the exhibit displayed on those big red metal girders. “Moving the Millions” explores the economic, political, and social history of the subway.

So, what resources can you take advantage of? Though much of the museum is permanent, it does have some gallery spaces for rotating exhibits. For current [http://www.mta.info/museum] exhibits, call or check the website. Be sure to ask about the daily tours that are free with admission, and check out and the wealth of information, fun games and creative activities available online at the Education Station at [www.transitmuseumeducation.org]. Go online before you visit to find out what kind of activities the education department has planned. You should also check out their online education resources [http://www.transitmuseumeducation.org/]. You should also be aware that Transit Museum exhibits are often shown at other locations, including the gallery at Grand Central Station and the Paine Webber Gallery in midtown Manhattan.

You’ll be glad to know that Laura Joseph, the museum’s Manager of Education, has offered to help you out with your research. You can call her directly at 718-694-1794. You don’t have to have a specific topic in mind or to have already seen the museum, but you should have some ideas about what you want to research. She can share some ideas to give you a jump start. She emphasizes that students can come to the museum to research both the design of public transit as well as the basic mechanics that allow the transit system to function. Also, while students can come in to do research on their own, Ms. Joseph also encourages teachers to bring their classes in, though she asks teachers to call the museum’s main number first. Note that the museum is wheelchair accessible, though wheelchair users should call ahead because the staff will need to open up a special entrance.

One more thing: in case you haven’t been paying attention during the past year: the subway just turned one hundred years old. Pretty impressive that a system that started with the opening of the first subway line on October 27, 1904 is still around and continues to grow and evolve with the city it serves.