Justice
Loving Transit, Breaking the Law
A new documentary explores how a man’s obsession with New York’s MTA lands him in a legal gray area.
In 1983, when Darius McCollum was 18 years old, he owned 139 keys for the Metropolitan Transit Authority system in New York. He could operate subway trains, get into ticket booths, use the showers, and issue commands from the control towers. His closet was lined with outfits given to him by transit worker friends: uniforms worn by bus drivers, subway operators, and sanitation workers. McCollum kept them in pristine condition.
“I might be doing a conductor one day, a bus driver the next, ticket booth another day,” he says in the new documentary Off the Rails: The Darius McCollum Story, which winds through McCollum’s nearly 40-year history of impersonating New York transit workers.