The general order goes into effect at 23:30. Trains are rerouted off the Lexington Avenue express south of 14th Street. The tunnel between Canal and Brooklyn Bridge belongs to the maintenance crews until 04:00.
Reggie Fontaine is forty-six. He has been an MTA track inspector for fifteen years. Before that he was a trackworker for eight. Before that, the Army, two tours in Iraq as a combat engineer.
He makes around 42 dollars an hour straight time. With the night differential and the weekend premium, overtime once a week, he grossed 118,000 last year.
"It's union work," he says. "Local 100. That's why the money is what it is."
He wears an orange high-vis vest over a Carhartt jacket, a hard hat with a head lamp, steel-toed boots, and a tool belt with a track gauge wrench, a measuring caliper, a can of white spray paint, and a notebook.
He carries a flashlight that he does not need most of the time. The tunnel has work lights every fifty feet. But when he walks past a column or into a switch room, the shadow swallows everything.
His partner tonight is Yolanda Rivera, third-year inspector, thirty-one years old. They walk in a line, never together, never both on the same rail. One ahead, one fifty feet back.
"You don't walk side by side," he says. "You walk staggered. You see what the other one missed."
They are looking for: cracks in the rail head, broken or missing bolts on the joint bars, loose tie plates, water under the rail, third-rail protection boards that have slipped, signal cables with damaged insulation.
He carries a small wheeled device, a rail flaw detector, but tonight is a visual inspection only. The flaw cars run on their own schedule.
At 00:42 he stops at a joint bar near a column marker reading 219. He kneels. He measures a gap with the caliper. He marks the rail with a swipe of white spray paint and writes in the notebook in pencil.
"Joint's working," he says. "Not bad yet. But I want it on the list."
Working means moving with the trains. Every joint moves a little. The bolts loosen. The plates wear. Eventually a joint becomes a defect and a defect becomes a slow order and a slow order becomes a derailment if you do not catch it.
He has been in the tunnel during a fire. A signal cable shorted on the Q line in 2017. He led seven workers out through an emergency exit at Atlantic Avenue.
He has been in the tunnel during a derailment. He did not see it happen. He arrived after, with the response team.
"You don't think about it," he says. "You can't. You'd never come back down."
His wife Tasha is a hospital social worker. They have twin girls, eight. He is home most mornings before they wake up. He sees them off to school. He sleeps from 09:00 to 16:30.
At 03:14 he and Yolanda reach Brooklyn Bridge. They have walked two miles of track in four hours. Twelve defects noted. Two flagged for immediate work.
They climb up to the platform. Yolanda buys a coffee from the vending machine on the mezzanine. Reggie drinks water.
At 03:55 the work train pulls them out. The general order ends at 04:00. The first downtown 4 train rolls past at 04:03.
"Most people in this city," he says, "never think about the rail under them. That's how I know I'm doing it right."
