Pam’s Pictorama Post: Like many folks somehow holiday activities here in Manhattan generally makes us burrow deeper in our apartments until all the fuss has passed rather than summoning us out. Accidentally finding yourself on the subway during Santa Con (the annual drunken Santa clad citywide pub crawl) is enough to send you screaming back to your apartment until well into the New Year.

While there was a time when I braved the crowds cheerfully to see the Thanksgiving Day balloons blown up on Central Park West, now I time a trip to New Jersey to be ensconced there the night before. (However some readers know that this year Blackie blew that plan up and I traveled back to New York on the Wednesday afternoon to take him to the kitty ER at work that evening. He is better and I ultimately I braved Penn Station and the parade again and returned to New Jersey to cook there. That post can be found here.)

For all of that, on a whim last weekend and knowing that Kim and I had a plan to head downtown for some shopping I needed to do, I decided that we would hop the Holiday Nostalgia train on Sunday as our mode of transportation. Sponsored by the Transit Museum in conjunction with the MTA, restored early subway cars are put back into commission on Sundays throughout December. This year the trains ran along a variation on the Q and F lines, starting up here on 96th Street and making our 86th Street and other UES stops before swinging east and taking us right to our destination near the Bowery.

Even at the second stop, ours, the train was already packed. (I guess the serious folks went up to 96th and got on there.) We squeezed in amongst people in period dress and a variety of Santa related and wildly festive costumes, as well as some other folks like us. I don’t know what I expected, but I was a bit disappointed at first because the crowd made some of the details of the train car harder to see. However, during the course of the ride we were pretty much able to take in everything, from the rattan seats to the period advertising reproduced for the occasion.

It was immediately apparent that the ride of the train felt very different – sort of the difference between a wooden rollercoaster and a modern one if you know what I mean. An old-fashioned paddle fan whirled away in the ceiling and the only ventilation were openings in the roof and the open door at the end of the car, at least in our case it was open. Incandescent light bulbs which you could have unscrewed while standing there lit it. Most notable though was the smell of the train – you could smell the diesel! We agreed, it smelled old.

At one point a man who clearly knew a thing or two about the history of the subway was standing next to me and explained that although the cars needed to be similar enough to be run together, every one was slightly different. (This made me a bit sorry it was too crowded to hop from car to car and see each.) I peered into the next car which did look somewhat different. According to a notice near the ceiling, our car was built in 1932. He also told me that the train would travel through some currently unused tunnels, allowing us to take our unusual route.

Soon enough our stop, the next to last for the train, came up and we hopped off. More of our adventure tomorrow. (What’s more there’s a rumor I might pinch hit as Santa for dog photos this coming week, so lots of festive fun here at Deitch Studio!)