Subway

A fairly common sound: a T1 subway car running eastbound between Greenwood and Victoria Park stations.

I was sitting in the same position as in my previous subway car recording, except I was at the end of the second car instead of the fourth, and this time I faced the microphones toward the inter-car door to pick up more of the track and wheel noise. It's also a much longer run, five and a half minutes, as the train passes through Coxwell, Woodbine, and Main stations. I had planned on shutting the recorder down at Main, since I was only going to the next station, but the corrugations on the track were too hard to resist.

Since the recorder wasn't hand-held I was able to take a few photos to show the scene. The Sony is on its Rycote shock mount, which is on an Ikan grip bar, which is on my fifteen-year-old 'Ultrapod II' plastic tripod. The whole assembly is a fairly lightweight addition to my kit and folds down into a package that almost fits into the Crumpler Haven pouch that organizes my audio kit.

And I never think to remove the windscreen.

Subway

An increasingly rare sound: a T1 subway car running southbound on the Spadina line.

Recorded between St. Clair West and Dupont station, this section of track includes the curving descent down Russell Hill, location of the fatal 1995 subway crash, as the tunnel drops under the Davenport ridge. I was sitting in the last set of seats of the fourth (of six) cars, with the recorder roughly equally spaced between the side of the car and the cab. Recorded shortly after 10pm on a Wednesday night, the train was fairly quiet and uncrowded.

I've added a short fade at both ends of the audio track, being careful not to step on the sounds of the door mechanism, and normalized the audio as I had left more headroom than necessary when I set the recording level. It was also my first time using the Rycote suspension mount that they make for hand-held recorders, which seems to work very well.