In the late night and early morning hours, when train frequencies are at their lowest, the 'garbage trains' ply the various divisions of the New York City subway system, collecting bags of rubbish from all the stations. At 5:40am on a Saturday morning, one of these trains is leaving 96th Street station on the IRT Lexington Avenue line, hauled by a purpose-built R127 'rubbish motor'. The bags of rubbish are lodade in two open gondolas, with a passenger car bringing up the rear, where the work crew were riding.
There are ten R127s in the subway fleet, built in 1990-1991 by Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Kobe, Japan, for work train service. They are similar to the R62 and R62A passenger cars, and are built to IRT specifications. A later order of a further eight cars followed, dubbed the R134.