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Stuart Melsinker stood at the end of the downtown platform at 14th Street at 1:10 yesterday afternoon doing his quiet fraction of the business of moving New York.
He started the last 13 minutes of his life by unhooking a portable phone from his belt. He plugged it into a cabinet of cables, and spoke briefly to a Transit Authority office that oversees thousands of underground telephones used by dispatchers, token clerks and tower operators to keep the trains running.
We're going to Astor Place, Melsinker told his office. He and his helper, David Davis, had to check a report of phone trouble from a dispatcher in the busy Brooklyn Bridge station.
Ho hum.
He hung up and they apparently caught the No. 6 train, the local, one stop to Astor Place.
Here, the IRT subway, the most ancient of the city's train lines, barrels to the left and then to the right, along a snaking route devised in bitter court battles by 19th Century property...