Escalators

Brent may not remember this, but we once wondered how many stories the escalator at the Porter Square T station, Boston’s deepest subway station, covers. It’s a really long escalator – one of the longest I’ve ridden.

porter_escalatorThe Wikipedia entry on the Porter station and this article on a scary escalator accident that occurred there both claim that the long escalator out of Porter station is 143 feet long.

I did a few calculations using numbers from the Wikipedia entry on escalators (a surprisingly and wonderfully interesting read), and found that a typical angle of incline for an elevator might be around 27º. This means that the Porter escalator covers about 65 feet in vertical distance, which, depending on how tall you think a “story” is, is somewhere between four stories and 5.5 stories.

(Incidentally, the Porter Square T station has a really cool art piece spread throughout, worth looking out for if you find yourself there.)

Some highlights from the Wikipedia entry on escalators:

Here’s a picture Hansie took last December, of me looking at escalator innards at the Harvard Square T stop:


porter_escalator

How Escalators Work

March 31, 2007. Boston/Cambridge, how things work. 1 Comment.

One Comment

  1. Peter Grandmaison replied:

    Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_tube_station, which is the longest escalator I’ve been on (and apparantly, the longest in Western Europe)

    June 6th, 2007 at 6:01 pm. Permalink.

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