The R68 is a B Division New York City Subway car order consisting of 425 cars built by the Westinghouse-Amrail Company (aka Francorail), a joint venture of Westinghouse, ANF Industrie, Jeumont Schneider, and Alsthom. The cars were built in France from 1986 to 1988 and shipped through New York Harbor. Of the cars in the fleet, 416 are arranged in four-car sets while the other nine are single cars. The R68 was the third R-type contract to be built with cars (the previous two being the R44 and R46). The first R68 train entered service on June 20, 1986. The R68's manufacturers suffered from significant system integration problems, and the fleet became known as a "lemon" in its early years, but its performance was improved following modifications by the New York City Transit Authority. In the 2010s, a small number of R68s received experimental upgrades. Description The R68 was the third R-type contract to be built with cars (the previous two being the R44 and R46), which have more room for sitting and standing passengers per car than the cars that were used previously and afterward. Like the R44s and R46s, which are also 75 feet long, they are prohibited from running on the BMT Eastern Division lines (J, L, M & Z trains) because of tight curves. This order was evolved from the R55, a proposed car that was considered in the early 1980s, but never left the drawing board, or purchased due to a lack of funding. Instead, more attention was paid to replacing the R12, R14, R15, and R17 fleets of the A Division, which were over 30 years old and worn-out at the time. The cars, numbered 2500–2924, cost about $1 million each. They replaced many R10s dating from 1948, all remaining 6300-series R16s dating from 1954 to 1955, and some R27s and R30s dating from 1960 to 1962. The cars are built with stainless steel, and are graffiti-resistant. The R68s are currently based in the Concourse Yard in the Bronx and the Coney Island Complex in Brooklyn and assigned to the B, D, N, Q, W, and Franklin Avenue Shuttle. As built, the R68s were originally single units, with a full-width cab on one end and a half-width cab on the other end. The R68s on the shuttle remain as single units with OPTO switches added, while the rest of the fleet were reconfigured into