One of my favorite regular features in Atlanta Magazine is Thomas Lake’s “Firsthand” column.  Lake “wanders the city with a notebook and pen” in hand, documenting the daily happenings of our sprawling metropolis.  He’s covered everything from a “midnight makeover” of Phillips Area from a hockey rink to a basketball court to burying Atlanta’s homeless in Palmetto.

This past month, Lake spent a few hours inside MARTA’s main control room, giving us an idea of what it takes to keep Atlanta’s transit functioning on a daily business.  Lake’s descriptions must be read for themselves, but here’s a taste…

The Rail Service Control Center runs nonstop, seven days a week, with nearly sixty workers in rotating shifts. They are the railroad equivalent of air traffic controllers. Before them, two Mosaic Display Boards dominate the room’s eastern wall. The boards resemble the black grids from the old board game Battleship, magnified a thousand times. They show diagrams of MARTA’s 48.1 miles of tracks, with 750 volts of direct-current electricity flowing through the third rail. The left board shows the trains moving. Each train glows red against the tracks.