Wednesday, October 30, 2024

LIRR announces November/Winter timetables with little upgrades.

Recently, the Long Island Rail Road announced it's winter timetables, lasting until March 2nd. I was hopeful that they'd add some extra trains around the holiday season, although so far I think it's safe to say that that is a myth. It turns out that they made very few changes to the schedules, many of them being tweaks to the train times. 

The other main change, though, is that the updated schedule enables Amtrak to take one of it's four tunnels out-of-service as they fix damage from storm surge flooding caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012! Interestingly, there will be no changes to weekend service, and I'm going to list below a couple of the more major changes the LIRR highlighted.

The LIRR announced a couple of days ago that it’s new fall timetables will take effect right after Labor Day on 9/3. As a Long Islander myself, these new timetables genuinely pleasantly-surprised me! I did not expect the LIRR to announce these new timetables so early, neither did I expect them to make such significant changes to off-peak service. 


  • Remember that odd 7:48 AM departure from Island Park to Atlantic Terminal? It will now leave at 7:21 AM and arrive at 8:12 AM
  • The 7:54 AM from Long Beach will depart at 7:41, drop Kew Gardens, and now run to Grand Central
  • The 8:02 AM from Long Beach will now drop Rosedale, Laurelton, and Locust Manor and instead add Kew Gardens.
  • The 4:26 PM from Port Jefferson to Jamaica will depart at 4:49 PM, with the LIRR making this change to allow for a later westbound option for Stony Brook students.
  • The 8:19 AM electric-run from Jamaica to Hunterspoint Avenue will no longer run, I mean at least we got it for a little while.

I'd also like to mention that the LIRR stated that midday service between Ronkonkoma & Greenport will resume on Monday, November 11, and through November 24, buses will replace all trains between Riverhead and Greenport as rail & switch equipment work moves eastward, and finally, on Monday, November 25, full service to Greenport will resume.

Now, this game as a great shock to me. I was really hoping that the LIRR would at least do something about the off-peak crowding problems that typically happen around the holidays, but, no, the LIRR did basically nothing about this besides shifting all off-peak trains on the busier branches to Penn Station, which was a major bonus. I really think they should add additional trains on Thanksgiving, and some of the busier weekends in December as people flock to the city for popular Christmas events and shopping such as The Radio City Rockettes, SantaCon, among many other things as last year dozens train loads exceeded 100 percent!     
I will elaborate on this whole situation in an upcoming post, but I do think that the LIRR needs to understand that they must switch over to off-peak ridership as their main focus. Also, everyone, have a good Halloween tomorrow and I'll see you in November!

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