After spending $2.6 million to replace its book delivery system, the New York Public Library can now officially drop books off to its customers by train!
Ever wanted your local library to be a bit more whimsical? Wished that things felt a little more Hogwarts-y or even more like Mr. Magorium’s Magic Emporium? Well, the New York Public Library heard those calls. As of 2016, the New York Public Library has had a little train chugging around its rooms, lugging books from one place to another for readers and researchers to indulge.
The train, or rollercoaster as it has been dubbed by some, was a massive improvement to the New York Public Library, and is loved by many. The librarians love it for its ease and whimsy, and customers love not having to rummage around 8 floors of books. Instead, they just sit back, relax, and wait for the train.
What’s the Point?
The New York Public Library is hardly a small building. It is 390 feet long and 270 feet wide, and the interior of the building has 8 floors. The little book train makes taking books from one side of the building to the other significantly easier.
The starting point of the train is 27 feet underground, near the New York Public Library’s storage facility. From there, the book train travels 350 feet up to the reading room on the 8th floor. The whole journey, from start to finish, takes this ambitious little train only five minutes! Yes, that’s right, the train is traveling at a whopping 75 feet per minute!
The idea is that anyone on the newly designed and remodeled 8th floor reading room (or anyone else, anywhere else in the building) can request books from the stacks without having to venture all the way down to the basement.
How Does It Work?
The mini book train is really quite clever. It’s more than just a box of books on wheels. As the train travels around the building, the boxes of books adjust themselves. They do this using a gimbal, a device designed to stabilize cameras and video cameras during photoshoots. The gimbal allows the train to travel at high speeds around corners and upside down.
The book train’s tracks are also lined with sensors so that the train can be tracked on its journey through the 11 different stops from the basement up to the 8th floor. These electronic sensors also prevent jams — once one car passes the first sensor, another car cannot be dispatched until it is far enough away. Generally, this creates a 15-second delay between the carts so as to prevent accidents or congestion.
Not to worry, though, as the New York Public Library has 25 train cars, and each can carry approximately three large art books, four small books, or, randomly, ten pamphlets.
The construction of the book train took eight months, starting in January 2016 and finishing in August. While under construction, the librarians had to resort to old-school methods of dragging large book carts up and down the building — it’s safe to say that they were very happy when the system was up and running!
The train line cost $2.6 million to build and construct. Each car that is on the system can carry 30lbs of weight, and they sit waiting in the Milstein stacks. There, librarians are sent electronic “pick lists.” These are sent every 5 minutes, and librarians use them to pick out books from the stacks, placing them in a store specifically for loading up into the train. The idea is that from the moment of request to the moment of receiving the text, library guests should have to wait no longer than 45 minutes, and shouldn’t need to leave the reading room they’re in!
How Did Books Move Before the Train?
Prior to the book train’s installation, the librarians had an older, simpler system to get books from A to B within the library. This system relied on a set of older chain and belt driven conveyors and mechanized lifts. The library had been relying on the pulley-style system for 25 years, and had realized that not only was the dated system on its way out, but that the second any of it broke — they were in trouble.
The company that made the vast majority of the parts for the conveyor had long since shut down, so if it decided to give up on them, there were no replacement parts available, and definitely nobody out there to come and maintain it.
For a while, when pieces broke, the library team desperately sourced out replacements online; resourceful folk, librarians! One of the librarians described the painful process, saying “whenever a belt would snap, it would be out for a week to 10 days while we hunted down the part.”
In February 2016, the conveyor built finally died a death. As a result, the library team had to start using a hand-operated dumbwaiter. This was a slightly better option than taking books around manually up and down the 8 floors, but was still nothing in comparison to the little train!
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Millie Ramm
Millie has been writing since she was a child, and has spent more time with her nose in books than anywhere else. She has been ghostwriting novels and editing for the past few years, and when not working she is curled up with her cats, looking for her next read.
