How bad is the E?

The E, the Queens workhorse that never gets a trophy

The E hauls more of Queens than any other letter, and it does the job without ceremony. It runs from Jamaica Center–Parsons/Archer at the borough's eastern edge to World Trade Center at the bottom of Manhattan, the express that drags commuters out of deep Queens into the financial district every weekday morning. It wears the same blue bullet as the A and C, but it carries its own assignment: shift the most people out of the most spread-out borough in the city. Down here distance is the enemy, and the E was built to defeat it.

Along the Queens Boulevard corridor the E runs express, and that distinction is the difference between a reasonable commute and a daily grind for riders coming from the far reaches of the borough. It skips the local stops on the way in, then dives beneath the river into Manhattan and heads down toward the World Trade Center. En route it serves the transfer hubs that lace the whole Queens network together, so a remarkable number of trips in the borough begin or end on an E. Shut it down and half of southeast Queens would lose its realistic route into lower Manhattan.

This is an airport line whether it advertises the fact or not. One of its stops feeds directly into the AirTrain that finishes the journey to JFK, so travelers with luggage are a permanent fixture of the E: suitcases wedged by the doors, riders juggling boarding passes at five in the morning, exhausted arrivals counting stations. It also serves the heart of Jamaica, a transit and commercial crossroads that acts as downtown for a huge slice of southeast Queens. Weaving a suitcase through a packed rush-hour car is a skill the route forces on nearly every flier who uses it.

The Queens Boulevard Line ranks among the busiest corridors in the system, and the E shares it with several other letters, which is both its greatest strength and its deepest vulnerability. The strength is frequency, which can be excellent when everything flows. The weakness is brittleness, because a single hiccup on the shared tracks ripples across every line using them. The E's story is bound up with the building of that corridor, one of the great expansions into the outer boroughs. When the shared corridor sneezes, every line on it catches a cold, and the E usually catches it first.

Regulars know the E for punishing rush-hour crowds and its habit of arriving packed from the very first stop. Because it collects so much of southeast Queens before it even reaches the river, some mornings turn boarding into a contact sport, and the polite fiction of personal space disappears entirely. Frequent service cushions the blow, and the express running keeps the long trip bearable. But catch a delay during peak hours and the whole thing backs up hard and fast. Riders have learned to bail a train early and walk the last few blocks rather than wait it out.

Physically, the ride is a study in contrasts. It runs elevated and open through the wide streets of outer Queens, then burrows into deep tunnels as it approaches Manhattan, finally ending underground at the World Trade Center, where the platforms sit far below the memorial plaza above. The switch from low suburban-feeling blocks to the sheer density of downtown happens within minutes, and it never quite stops feeling a little jarring to watch out the window. You board among the low houses and step off beneath the towers, and the change comes so fast you almost miss it.

Honest read: the E is indispensable and underappreciated in equal measure. It forms the backbone of Queens commuting, it reaches the airport, and it runs constantly, yet it is crowded, it shares its tracks with too many neighbors, and it almost never gets credit for the weight it carries. For tens of thousands of people the E is not a choice at all; it is the only sane way into Manhattan. It does not ask for applause, and it never receives any. That is a shame, because the E quietly does the heaviest lifting of any line in the borough.