While visiting the NYC Transit Sign shop in Brooklyn recently, Off the Rails blog caught a glimpse of the secret names of subway colors. Since the current design for the subway map was adopted in 1979, each shade for each line was given its own moniker; only a "handful of transit workers who oversee the system’s maps and signs" had seen it before. But now the colorful cat's out of the bag!
The colors are assigned based on a subway route’s “trunk line” - that is, which avenue it runs along in Manhattan (because this is a pre-Copernican world of Manhattan-centricity). So the N, R, Q and W lines are called “sunflower yellow.” The Nos. 1, 2, and 3 trains are “tomato red.” The No. 7 line, which is purple, is actually known as “raspberry.” The hue for the A, C and E lines is “vivid blue.” The Lexington Avenue line is “apple green.” The L line is “slate gray,” and the J and Z lines are “terra cotta brown.” Changing trains to get from the sunflower to the tomato never felt so agrarian.
