Any NYC commuter has heard the sound of Bernie Wagonblast echoing along the Big Apple’s numbered subway lines, telling passengers when a train is approaching a station or how far away the next one is.
Wagonblast, 66, of Cranford, New Jersey, is a staple of the NYC subway system, but hardly any commuters can put a name or a face to the deep voice projected onto the platform.
Now, Wagonblast — who also does announcements for AirTrain at Newark Liberty International Airport and the PATCO system in South Jersey and Philadelphia — has come out as a transgender woman.
She first announced her decision to transition in December 2022. ‘As of January 1st, I plan to start living as a woman full time,’ Wagonblast said in a social media post at the time.
Although she sounds very different now after seeing a speech therapist to develop her feminine voice – because estrogen doesn’t change the depth of a person’s voice – she admitted on Anna Sale’s podcast Death, Sex and Money that she still uses her ‘hidden’ voice. . Professionally.
Any New Yorker or commuter has heard the sound of Bernie Wagonblast reverberating through the Big Apple’s numbered subway lines, but rarely can a traveler put a name or a face to the deep voice projected onto the platform. Now, Wagonblast — who also does announcements for AirTrain at Newark Liberty International Airport and the PATCO system in South Jersey and Philadelphia — has come out as a transgender woman.
Wagonblast, which officially came out on December 28, told Cell, ‘I’ve only been using this sound full-time since January 1. ‘Before that, I was working on it, but most of my conversations I call my persona voice and professionally I still use that voice.’
Wagenblast remembers being four years old when she realized she felt more like a girl than a boy, she said in her interview.
She said, ‘I distinctly remember being at my grandmother’s house, sitting in front of her vanity, with some necklaces around her neck, and I think she had powder on her vanity and put it on my face.’
‘Felt good. It felt natural. It felt like: “Why can’t I do this?:’
She doesn’t remember when it entered her mind that boys shouldn’t enjoy those things, but ‘pretty soon I realized this wasn’t okay.’
As a young child, while playing with a female friend who lived across the street, he suggested swapping clothes. After doing so, her friend’s brother told her parents, who then told Wagonblast’s family, who reiterated to her that this was ‘not acceptable’.
She would first share her identity as a transgender woman with a teacher in a nearby town named Paula Grossman, who had transitioned and was later fired as a teacher for her.
Wagonblast found her information in a NYC phonebook sent her a letter, and later arranged a phone call to a payphone half a mile from her home.
‘We set up a time and I sent her the phone number and she called me and it was the first time I shared with someone how I felt and talked to someone who I knew could understand what I was going through.
‘Near the station is the downtown local 6 train to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall’: Wagonblast can be heard on subway platforms on numbered lines including the 4, 5 and 6 trains.
‘And I have to give her a lot of credit because I was young and she took risks,’ she said.
She later revealed her identity to her girlfriend in college and their relationship ended shortly thereafter. The next person she shared with would be her soon-to-be wife.
‘It was obvious that I was going to ask her to marry me, but I felt that if I was going to do it, she needed to know about this part because I knew by then this was never going to go away, and any Which I was going to have to live with to some degree if I was going to get married,’ she said on the podcast.
She took her then-girlfriend to Liberty State Park in New Jersey and broke down in ‘tears’, fearing the end of their relationship. Luckily for Wagonblast, ‘She told me she loved me.’
‘She told me it was okay that we could deal with this, that this wasn’t the end of our relationship,’ Wagenblast said. At the time, the couple had only been dating for a few months. ‘It was much better than I could have hoped for at the time.’
They would have three children, a secret Wagonblast shared in person four years ago.
‘All three of my daughters are married, so we had separate conversations with each one. My wife and I met with him together and told him how I always felt about myself NYC and some of the things I used to do, but still at that time there was no plan for me to transition or change my appearance, or that Even at times, my legal identity or gender,’ she said.
‘It was to convey to them something that I had always struggled with and wanted them to be aware of. I didn’t want them to hear this secondhand if something happened to me. I didn’t want them to not have the opportunity to talk to me about it and ask me questions and really get to know their father on a deeper level.’
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The sound of the wagon last was broadcast to the ears of New Yorkers long before they began to hear it in the subway tunnels. She began her career in media as a radio personality on two major city stations in her early 20s
Wagonblast would soon begin to transition socially, first with hormone therapy and then by purchasing more androgynous clothing, and NYC eventually legally changing her name to Bernadette.
‘I’ve done what I think is a slow but deliberate transition, and I’ll start changing things here and there,’ she said.
‘One of the first things I did was I went on the lowest dose of hormone replacement therapy in the hope that maybe that would be NYC enough to calm me down. And I think the knowledge that I now had estrogen in my bloodstream felt great.’
Since transitioning, Wagenblast has sported shoulder-length blonde hair and continues to work on making her voice louder.
Wagonblast is trying to use her new voice ‘more and more’ to make it ‘more natural’, but for now, she’ll continue to use her famous dulcet tones for subway announcements, and when she’s asked to record Fresh audio to go with Newark’s new airport terminal.
She said it was ‘weird’ recording the new announcements in her ‘guy voice’, but now found it ‘much easier’ to switch between the two voices.
The MTA – which runs the NYC subway – supported its employee on social media, sharing a link to the podcast on his Instagram account, writing: ‘Get to know Bernie Wagonblast! If you ride our numbered subway line, you’ve probably heard her announce the arrival of your train!’
On his way to record a podcast, Wagonblast ducked into a subway station ‘to hear how it sounds these days.’
Wagonblast came out publicly on Facebook and LinkedIn on December 28, announcing that she would ‘start living as a female full-time’ on January 1.
‘I thought he was a bit loud,’ she laughed. ‘But you have to be loud in New York to hear all the other noise.’
The sound of the wagon last was broadcast to the ears of New Yorkers long before they began to hear it in the subway tunnels. She began NYC her career in media as a radio personality on two major city stations in her early 20s.
‘Not only was I on the air in New York, I was on two stations in New York in drive time, which is when most people listen. [the] Radio So, it was a dream come true to be in this kind of situation,’ she told Cell.
She wanted to be a broadcaster since fifth grade and was excited to finally achieve it.
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As a child, she would ‘take the newspaper and read it aloud just to try to develop that voice.’
‘As my voice began to deepen, I welcomed it. I knew it would sound more authentic, and it sounded better than a high-pitched voice,’ she said on the podcast.
When asked if she was troubled by developing her deep voice, she said that she felt ‘unfortunately I have to live as a man for the NYC rest of my life’ and that it was best to develop a voice that would lead to the job she wanted.
‘So doing a deep voice was the best way to move on and do what I loved to do. And I think it was a distraction in some ways,’ Wagenblast said.
Although subway advertising and her other professional work would remain in her ‘cow voice’, Wagonblast would explore using her female voice in her work on Transportation Radio and Cranford Radio.
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