NEW YORK — Full Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central Madison began this morning (Monday, Feb. 27) as part of the introduction of schedules that bring a 41% increase in weekday LIRR service systemwide.
The shift to the new schedule and introduction of service to the new station from all LIRR branches — many direct, some requiring a change of trains — follows a Sunday ceremony at Grand Central Madison featuring U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, MTA CEO Janno Lieber, and other federal and local officials following a train ride from LIRR’s Jamaica station.
The new schedules add 271 trains on weekdays, increasing the systemwide total to 936 trains per day. Of those, 296 will serve Grand Central Madison [see “Grand Central Madison … debuts,” Trains News Wire, Jan. 25, 2023]. Information on the new schedules, including timetables, is available here.
“LIRR is thrilled to be offering more frequent service and more flexibility to our customers,” said Catherine Rinaldi, interim president of the LIRR and president of Metro-North Railroad, in a press release. “Grand Central Madison also provides connectivity between LIRR and Metro-North for the very first time, opening up a new era of regional rail travel for customers of both railroads.”
Hochul said the full opening of the new station is a public transportation feat that will shorten commutes, giving commuters time back in their busy lives to spend with their families, friends and communities. Grand Central Madison will dramatically expand service and operate more reliably for commuters and reduce overcrowding at Penn Station.”
East Side Access will likely become a case study on how to go immensely over budget in years, even decades, and money, how not to manage projects, how to maximize feather bedding, poor change control, poor planning and more. Also, how to maximize how many railroad passengers to tick off.
1. What seems like very limited testing of the tracks and signals before opening (compare it to CrossRail in London).
2. Instead of Metro North and LIRR cooperating to bring trains into the existing lower level of GCT, building a massively expensive terminal way underneath GCT.
3. At Jamaica Station, if you have to go up and over, you have to pray that escalators and elevators are working, and they are only at the east end of the station – if you need a west end car because of overcrowding, you’ll never make your transfer – but don’t worry, eventually there will probably be another train to catch, though hopefully you know which track soon enough to get there on time.
4. Diesel territory passengers have no direct access to GCT-LIRR, because in the 1990’s, the diesel equipment they specified was a few inches too tall for the East River tunnel.
5. Last I heard, the 40% increase was based on pandemic lows, though I could be wrong about that.
6. They don’t have enough working electric cars for the service.
7. Reverse service improvements don’t apply to diesel territory.
8. If you work late, hopefully you make the right choice of terminal to go to for your ride east. If not…
While this a great accomplishment and makes life much easier for LIRR commuters working on the East Side of Manhattan as well some much needed service improvements, something had to be sacrificed or cut and I read an article on a local NYC website paper where Brooklyn service was cut dramatically to the point where LIRR trains to the Flatbush Avenue terminal in Brooklyn are practiclly running as shuttles between Jamaica and Brooklyn. There are a few direct trains in the daytime from Brooklyn serving Hempstead and Freeport but the direct service between Brooklyn and Long Island has been cut and this has created both travel times and connection issues for Brooklyn commuters dependent on the LIRR. With every step forward or accomplishment, there will always be something taken away or cut back. Joseph C. Markfelder
Mr. Markfelder: You make a good point. It may look to the riders to/from from east of Jamaica that the NYMTA and LIRR have thrown them under the proverbial “bus”. I can see how this would especially sting if transferees are subject to using stairs for the move between the platform their train arrived at to the one their train is departing from. I remember reading somewhere that a goodly number of riders who worked in lower Manhattan rode to Atlantic Terminal rather than Penn Station for transfer to a subway line. Don’t know if that’s still the case or if most of that ridership is now WFH. As you observe, something had to give with the service expansions promised after the opening of GCM. The number of train crews, equipment for them to run, and track space for them to operate on at key chokepoints, is finite. Overall, having Grand Central for a second Manhattan terminal is a great thing and actually may grow ridership systemwide. The potential for inter-regional trips in conjunction with Metro North is certainly there with the sting of a two-seat ride mitigated by the same-station transfer. I’m looking forward to trying out the latter situation later this year with a daytrip Wassaic-Ronkonkama that gets me a ride over the new triple-track main Floral Park-Hicksville.
The new Brooklyn service is pretty frequent: every 10 minutes peak, 20 all other times, including overnight. Most trains are indeed shuttles now (though 15-20/day to West Hempstead is more than a few), but Brooklyn trains always had high turnover at Jamaica.
Commuters may grumble about the permanent new platform assignment at Jamaica that requires an up-and-over transfer every time, but putting those trains anywhere else in the complex would be a hot mess with the added frequencies to Manhattan.
I am excited to go see this when I get back to NYC. Interested to see how travel patterns and ridership changes too.
Schumer looks just like Donald Trump doing that pointy thing. Pathetic. Bet that’s the first and last train he will ever ride.