46th Street

The 46th Street station is a local station on the IND Queens Boulevard Line of the New York City Subway. Located at the intersection of 46th Street and Broadway in Astoria, Queens, it is served by the M train on weekdays, the R train at all times except nights, and the E and F trains at night.

The Queens Boulevard Line was one of the first lines built by the city-owned Independent Subway System (IND), and stretches between the IND Eighth Avenue Line in Manhattan and 179th Street and Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. The Queens Boulevard Line was in part financed by a Public Works Administration (PWA) loan and grant of $25 million. One of the proposed stations would have been located at 46th Street. The first section of the line, west from Roosevelt Avenue to 50th Street, opened on August 19, 1933. E trains ran local to Hudson Terminal (today's World Trade Center) in Manhattan, while the GG (predecessor to current G service) ran as a shuttle service between Queens Plaza and Nassau Avenue on the IND Crosstown Line. The station entrances to 48th Street did not open until some time after October 1933, when the Astoria Heights Taxpayers Association circulated petitions demanding that these entrances be opened. The station was closed in June 2023 for structural improvements.

This underground station has two tracks and two side platforms. The E and F trains serve the station at night, the M train serves the station on weekdays during the day, and the R train serves the station at all times except late nights. The station is between Steinway Street to the west and Northern Boulevard to the east. The express tracks on the IND Queens Boulevard Line, used by the E and F trains during daytime hours, run via a separate routing under Northern Boulevard. Both platforms have a purple tile band with a black border and mosaic name tablets reading "46TH ST." in white sans-serif lettering on a black background and purple border. Small tile captions reading "46TH ST" in white on black run below the tile band, and directional signs in the same style are present under some of the name tablets. The tile band was part of a color-coded tile system used throughout the IND. The tile colors were designed to facilitate navigation for travelers going away from Lower Manhattan. As such, the purple tiles used at the 46th Street station were originally also used at Queens Plaza, the next express station to the west, while a different tile color is used at Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue, the next express station to the east. Purple tiles are similarly used at the other local stations between Queens Plaza and Roosevelt Avenue. Fixed platform barriers, which are intended to prevent commuters falling to the tracks, are positioned near the platform edges. Royal purple I-beam columns run along both platforms at regular intervals, alternating ones having the standard black station name plate with white lettering. The I-beam piers are located every 15 feet (4.6 m) and support girders above the platforms. The roof girders are also connected to columns in the platform walls. The tunnel is covered by a U-shaped trough that contains utility pipes and wires. The outer walls of this trough are composed of columns, spaced approximately every 5 feet (1.5 m) with concrete infill between them. There is a 1-inch (25 mm) gap between the tunnel wall and the platform wall, which is made of 4-inch (100 mm)-thick brick covered over by a tiled finish. The columns between the tracks are also spaced every 5 feet (1.5 m), with no infill.

Data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).