R143 (New York City Subway car)

The Transit Authority had projected that 212 Kawasaki-made R143 subway cars would be enough to accommodate ridership demands for years to come, but ridership has risen higher than expected. Therefore, sixty-eight new R160A cars manufactured by Alstom were equipped with CBTC so they could run on the L.

The contract for the R143 was put out to tender in January 1998. The initial contract called for 100 sixty-foot cars that would come in five-car sets. The new cars would be expected to have automatic PA announcements, high efficiency lighting, emergency intercom and customer alarms, AC propulsion motors, speedometers and event recorders, electronic information display signs, artwork, a central diagnostics monitoring system, microprocessor-controlled air compressor, brake and communication systems, roof-mounted microprocessor-controlled HVAC, and to be compliant with ADA requirements.[6]

Kawasaki Rail Car Company was awarded a $190 million contract for 100 new B Division cars in late December 1998, with an option for 112 more cars.[7][8] The new design was based on the A Division's R142A, which Kawasaki also built,[9] and incorporated many features from the R110A and R110B prototypes. The cars were built with an average cost of about $1.5 million per car.

Delivery of the cars began in late 2001. A 30-day revenue acceptance testing with one train of eight cars (8101–8108) began on December 4, 2001.[10][11] According to Kawasaki, the test was "extremely successful".[9] The cars began running on the Canarsie Line (L train) on February 12, 2002, where they have been assigned to.[12] All 212 cars were delivered by March 2003.[13]

Along with displacing older equipment from the Canarsie Line, the R143s also displaced the R42s on the now-extended weekend M shuttle service on the BMT Myrtle Avenue Line, when that line became the first BMT Eastern Division line to be placed in a weekend One Person Train Operation (OPTO) service. The R143s on the M were later displaced by the R160As in February 2008. OPTO service was also tested on the L during mid-2005, but it ended due to safety issues.[14][15]

The R143 electronic strip map equipment shared between the L and J/Z

Cars 8205–8212 were originally delivered with experimental Siemens traction motors that would be later found in R160B cars 8843–9102. These cars were eventually refitted with the Bombardier MITRAC traction motors found on all other R143s.[16]

On June 21, 2006, an eight-car R143 train overshot the bumper at the end of the tracks in the Canarsie Yard after the operator suffered a seizure. The first car, 8277, suffered significant damage and was stripped of damaged parts before being sent to the Kawasaki plant in Yonkers to receive repairs. The other cars in the set (8278–8280) suffered minor body damage and were moved to the 207th Street Yard and repaired. Eventually, 8277 was sent back to New York City Transit property and repaired. By 2016, car 8277 was finally recoupled with 8278–8280, but the consist needed component upgrades to become operational.[17] The set returned to service in December 2017.[lower-alpha 1]

In 2017, a set of R143s was equipped with measuring gauges to test out the curve radius and gangway flex in the existing 60-foot-long cars in order to collect data for evaluating the future R211T order.[lower-alpha 2]

In September 2020, the interior strip maps for these cars, which originally only depicted stops on the L route, were replaced with combined strip maps that includes stops on both the J/Z and L services; this follows a similar conversion that took place to the R142 strip maps on the 2/5 services between 2016 and 2018.[18]