It was a temporary stunt as part of a city-wide cleanup. The goal was to give a "first class experience" to commuters.
Amtrak still has bar cars on many routes, hence why I love getting blitzed on the way to DC.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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The bay area ferries have bars too, and great ones. Excellent beer selection and really good bloody Marys.
This looks like it belongs alongside the piano bars they reportedly had on the upper decks of 747s for a short time after they were introduced.
This Beige Batman?
It looks like something has broken in the USA in the '70s. It only went downward from there...
The funny thing about this generalization is that this was a stunt because the city needed to be cleaned up so badly.
It was a temporary stunt as part of a city-wide cleanup. The goal was to give a "first class experience" to commuters.
But I think the problem ultimately at the start of the 1970s was Richard Nixon. Awful president who put us on the path we’re on.
Ever since I learned of this, I think of it frequently:
so wtf happened in 1971 then?
Well, first of all, absolutely nobody was kung-fu fighting. It was virtually unheard of.
Who were going to be as fast as lightning then?
Chuck Yeager
Well, that's more than a little bit frightening.
My guess is the end of the gold standard as its being referenced quite a few times across the webpage and it's at the inflexion point of lots of these graphs.
But I didn't check if it was a major cause or just correlation.
Ya, I'm always called a simpleton for saying ditching the gold standard was a mistake. But somehow a system where banker bros can just print money for each other is better?
Why should that dollar I have in my bank account be worth less year after year? Why should the 1% have access to a system of near limitless loans, allowing them to buy up and monopolize every aspect of life, from food, to housing, to healthcare?
Shits fucked if you ask me.
Yeah, what happened in 1971 is the end of the gold standard. But what happened in the late 60s, and early 70s was a major increase in the workforce as boomers began entering it, and increasingly women were working careers instead of staying home to raise the children. Meanwhile Japanese and European manufacturing were finally recovering from the war, so the American prosperity from being the only major manufacturing power aside from the much smaller countries in the Americas and Oceania was ending. Later in the 70s the MBAs would begin taking power economically, and the new deal reforms began being whittled down in the name of deregulation, especially in the 80s.
I'm old enough and have been on the internet long enough to be able to spot gold nuts…
The Bretton Woods system was built on Keynesian economics (and Keynes himself played a big role in it). When Bretton Woods collapsed the ideas of assholes from the Chicago school of economics (such as Friedman) took over and shaped monetary policy, fucking over absolutely everything in their path.
It's not the collapse of Bretton Woods as much as the absolutely shitshow that replaced it. American leaders designed a state ideology of capitalism and convinced every idiot it the country to rally behind it.
end of the gold standard
It didn't start out from a good place either. US in the 70s was still homophobic, racist, and bombed the shit out of middle east. Reminds you of anything?
The Long Island Railroad had bar cars in that era, so even if you couldn't on the subway, you could get your drink on between NYC and your home in the suburbs. They started phasing them out in the '80s, and they were gone by 2000. I lived next to the LIRR as a kid and remember seeing them on trains heading East out of the city in the late afternoons.
What's going on with the guy's face in the brown coat?
This photo was colorized at some point, likely recently, because it's fairly well done.
I suppose his face is blocked for the same reason faces are ever blocked in photos, so no one can recognize who it is.
The "ghost" in the window is just someone outside the train looking in, and not colorized. The train is stopped at the station.
I had the same question. Every photo I could find of the event had this guy censored. Or it's just a photo error that looks like censorship?
Edit: wait, I think I found the answer. It looks like there was a guy walking in front of him, and someone tried to edit that out in some versions of this photo.
It looks to me like the colorizing was done by AI and it got all wonky on that part.
Or the ghost in the window.
Meanwhile in the city I live in, it's a violation of transport conditions to consume alcohol on most public transport, including the metro. 😁
The train car has been dressed up, but it wasn't built for this sort of use. They've shoved the bar in one of the doorways. I expect this was an experiment, or a special event of some sort. Maybe they were considering adding a purpose-built car if this proved successful--whatever measure they were using for "successful".
I think we all now know the "something that broke", we're seeing the fruits of their labors today. Everything we're seeing right now has been planned for all of my life, as it turns out. It's easy to see in hindsight, of course. I have faith the fascists will fail again, eventually, as they always have. But, there could be many horrible years yet to come, before things get better again.