Blaze guts New York subway line

Subway trains are a vital part of New York's transport system

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are facing long-term travel disruption after a subway fire put a key rail line out of action.

The city's C line, serving Manhattan and Brooklyn, is out of service and the parallel A line is severely damaged.

Sunday's fire, in a shopping trolley in or around a Manhattan station, quickly spread to vital cables, power supplies, circuits and signalling equipment.

Investigators believe a homeless person trying to keep warm started the fire.

An entire room containing switching circuits and signalling infrastructure was gutted by the fire, which authorities said had spread after wood and clothing piled in the shopping trolley was set ablaze.

The BBC's Jeremy Cooke in New York says that for many of New York's travelling public, this is little short of disaster.

That one small fire has caused such serious and long-term disruption underlines the fragility of the New York subway, parts of which have barely been updated in 100 years, he adds.

Long delays

"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," Lawrence G. Reuter, president of the New York City Transit, told the Associated Press news agency.

Before the fire the C line carried about 110,000 passengers each day.

The A line, which runs parallel to the C line for some of its route, carries 470,000 passengers daily.

Repairing the line will take "several millions of dollars and several years", Mr Reuter said.

Passengers trying to make routine journeys on Monday and Tuesday were frustrated by lengthy delays between trains on alternate lines.

"They're not letting us know anything," Scot Anthony, 34, told the New York Times as he watched crowded trains pass through a station.

"The MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] keeps jacking up the fare and giving their top executives big bonuses and giving fat contracts to corrupt contractors, instead of taking care of the subway system."