While I thought that subway payphones would be able to hold onto their useful life for quite some time due to the lack of cell phone coverage in underground stations, it appears that they are quickly disappearing from even these locations. Luckily some stations are adding emergency and information speaker phones. The problem I have with these speaker phones is background noise. While maintenance costs would be reduced because there is no handset or armored handset cord to get vandalized the compromise is the reduced ability to hear the person at the other end, or for them to be able to hear you with the added background noise of trains exiting and entering the station.
In future updates to the site I will begin to document/catalog these new emergency speaker phones and their locations. As for providing telephone numbers for these phones I do not yet know if it would be possible for me to find that information out. I have noticed that some of them are labeled with extension numbers, but I do not know if those are dialable extensions or just for internal use, such as to locate the phone. I also am unsure if they have PTSN access, or are strictly connected to the MTAs PBX.
More to come soon....
