Printed or Digital?

In March of 2021, LIRR & MNR ended the days of consulting to paper timetables as a cost-cutting measure approved in the MTA's 2021 budget. Ever since the first days of the LIRR back in the 1830s,  the LIRR has been printing these timetables, but as of March of 2021, is relying on passengers to either 1. Print the timetables, 2. View them on the website or use TrainTime, or 3. Use the station announcement information, which isn't always right. 

The last set of paper branch timetables was at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as since then it's been tweaking it's schedules all the more often to try to meet new ridership demand, while balancing capacity and costs —the railroad issued about 18 different schedule revisions over the course of 3 weeks, showing how desperate they were to keep up. If they were to update this every one of those time, it would be very difficult, costly, and wasteful. The very last set of paper timetables that was distributed were the March 9, 2020 timetables, right as the pandemic was making it's way into New York. They seam to have printed a batch of schedules that were supposed to go into effect on May 18, 2020, however, they ended up being cancelled. 

The LIRR & MNR previously printed multiple times of timetables, the normal ones for each line, along with some smaller, pocket-sized ones that featured only a few stations (e.g Sayville, Oakdale, & Great River). In 2019, however, as a cost-cutting measure, the LIRR eliminated these individual station timetables due to usage-declining.

Unlike there unlikely counterparts, the normal paper timetables held on, with the LIRR printing 3 million a year for little cost as advertisements paid the company printing the schedules. However, as the digital age became more apparent and more and more and more and more people became digital, the usage of these paper branch timetables declined, especially since it can be very cumbersome to view in paper form- especially on branches that have a lot of trains.

The Digital Age

With the elimination of the paper timetables, riders must either print the timetables a head of time, use the amazing TrainTime app, or look at the schedules via the MTA website.

PDF timetables

The LIRR's Timetables page still offers the full PDF timetables for each branch along with special event & trackwork timetables, and this page is a good one, it's easy for the average Dashing Dan to find, yet it's authoritative, and provides everything needed.

Now, I gotta admit, I think the LIRR's old (as seen there) and the LIRR's new (as seen below) timetable pages are nicely done, something that is rather rare to find on the MTA's website. 

However, since the beginning of time, I've always thought it's rather difficult to read the LIRR's PDF timetables, now, after years of practice, I've gotten better at it, but especially for people that aren't very familiar with the LIRR, it can be quite confusing, and I think the LIRR should redesign the PDF timetables into a format that's a little easier to read, and while the LIRR isn't terrible (I'm looking at you New Jersey Transit!), there's certainly room for improvement. 

Metro-North, the LIRR's sister, has already revamped their timetables to make them much more elegant and simpler and because I'm fond of their design, and that is now the generally the style I use when I'm making example timetables for the site (yup, their coming, stay tuned!!!!!!!!).

I'm still in the process of making my new timetables, but I wanted to get this post out, so I decided to borrow The LIRR Today's timetables for this photo, but this gives you a pretty good rough estimate about what it will look like for my secret project 👀

TrainTime

TrainTime, ahh, TrainTime, the MTA's online app trip-planning tool and a railfanner's BFF (nah, the Radar is, but this is second)

To be honest, I think that this is one of those few things that the LIRR really put all of their effort into and therefore, it came out as a very clean, published, application with very few issues.