This week there was a flurry of announcements about the exciting changes that are about to take place on the Long Island Rail Road.
The opening of the new Grand Central access line and the completion of the Third Track project has to be great news for the thousands of people who take the train each day to New York City. At the same time, I had a flashback about the railroad itself and what riders have suffered to get to this point.
It’s hard to believe that the Long Island Railroad, or the LIRR as we know it, was first started 188 years ago in 1834. Over the years, there have been many challenges to the railroad. Most people are not aware of its difficulties.
In the mid-1960s the private owner of the railroad declared bankruptcy. Recognizing that Long Island needed its mass transit, the state stepped in and made it part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority system.
After just a few years of state ownership, the LIRR had to weather a major wreck in Rockville Centre and a bitter dispute over the Budd M-1 cars, whose defects caused constant delays in daily service. I was a state assemblyman at the time and as a public service, I decided to hold a hearing to give commuters a chance to air their gripes. The unpublicized event attracted over 1,000 people at the old Garden City Hotel. The public outcry caught the attention of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and within days, the governor pledged that the car fiasco would be resolved.
A few of us in the Legislature made a lot of noise about poor service and I was able to get some additional funds for rail improvements. The late state Sen. John Caemmerer of Williston Park was successful in getting a large plot of land on Manhattan’s West Side for storage of idle trains, hoping that having the cars ready at all hours would improve service. Things got better, but labor issues at the repair shops and the lack of additional state funding kept the LIRR in limbo.
The LIRR’s future got a little brighter about 10 years ago when the MTA announced that it was going to connect the current train line to Penn Station with Grand Central Station by the installation of a rail tunnel.
Many Long Islanders work on the East Side and have to travel crosstown once their train arrives at Penn Station. The project has been burdened by past cost overruns and construction delays, but Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced that the two stations will officially connect at the end of this year.
The second major event is the planned addition of a third track from Floral Park to Bethpage Station.
By adding a third track the railroad will be able to get more trains to and from the city during rush hours. LIRR Acting President Katherine Rinaldi has announced that later this year there will be a dramatic increase in available trains.
Westbound train service will go from 76 daily trains to 120. Eastbound riders will gain an increase in service from 98 trains to 158 daily trips. Having all of these cars available is expected to cut the daily commute on most lines by 40 minutes.
These two successes will mean that the LIRR of tomorrow will no longer look like the LIRR of today. It will guarantee that the 300,000 plus daily riders have choices they never dreamed of and a much shorter commute to work.
The planned revitalization of a number of local downtown railroad locations will attract younger riders who would like to remain in the region if possible.
Knowing much of the history of this much-maligned railroad operation, I am happy for the 1.3 million island residents who have desperately wished for a better LIRR. Government tends to move slowly, but happily the train that was once the light at the end of the tunnel has finally arrived.