page_title: New York City Subway nomenclature
section_title: Elimination of double letters
hierarchical_section_title: New York City Subway nomenclature / History / Unification and post-unification / Elimination of double letters
caption_attribution_description: The destination sign for a 4 train to Woodlawn, leaving 125th Street-Lexington Avenue.
context_page_description: New York City Subway nomenclature is the terminology used in the New York City Subway system as derived from railroading practice, historical origins of the system, and engineering, publicity, and legal usage. Important terms include lines, or individual sections of subway, like the BMT Brighton Line; services, like the B, which is a single train route along several lines; and stations, such as Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue, which connects multiple lines and services.
  Lines and services on the New York City Subway are often confused with each other. Lines are physical train tracks, while services are the routes that use the tracks. This distinction is also made on other systems, including the Washington Metro and historically Taipei Metro, although the exact terms used differ.
context_section_description: In June 1979 the former color scheme was scrapped, and the TA settled on the more coherent policy of assigning the same color to every service on each Manhattan mainline, as well as the color lime green for the IND Crosstown Line, which does not enter Manhattan. The same colors are still used today. Nevertheless, no New York subway line is officially referred to by its color, e.g., BMT Broadway Line services as the "Yellow Line."  While referring to lines by their color, as is common in some other cities, is a convenient shorthand for the regions of Manhattan where lines and colors are relatively unambiguous (from roughly Houston Street to 50th Street, and further uptown for the "red" and "green" lines), this practice would be confusing outside of that region (due to multiple services being assigned the same color).
  On May 5, 1985, the last significant change in route identification policy was made after the TA had decided in 1981 that the single and double letter system of the original IND was no longer meaningful, given that there were many services that were express for part of their route and local for other parts. In most cases, this was accomplished by simply eliminating the second letter in route designations. There is no longer a letter designation for specials (formerly S).
  By the 1990s, the TA were moving steadily toward using traditional line names on maps and especially on signage. All of the southern Brooklyn subway lines now show the traditional line names (except for the BMT Fourth Avenue Line) in order to distinguish between services going to Coney Island via different lines. On BMT/IND equipment branch line names frequently appear on operating trains, in addition to the route letter. R32 equipment with rollsigns, for example, may read:
  
  
   
   
   
   
  Newer rollsigns on R40 up to the R68A (including the former rollsigns on the R44 and R46 that now have LCD displays) have the route's bullet on the left side, and the two destinations on the right side. A rollsign on an R68 D train may read:
  One change which precedes pre-unification has to do with the use of locality names. While these were discouraged during the 1960s after they had been inherited from private operators, many terminal stations are once again described by both a community and a street name; e.g., Inwood–207th Street for the northern destination of the A service, and Wakefield–241st Street for the northern destination of the 2 service.
  The JFK Express, started in 1978 and discontinued in 1990, used a turquoise bullet; this stayed through the color change.
caption: An R142 side sign indicating that this 4 train runs express on the IRT Eastern Parkway Line
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