With all that being emphasized, in their draft schedules, the LIRR did restart their schedules from scratch and ripped up a lot of service patterns along with creating new ones. And, the new East Side Access timetables did bring a lot of improvements to the table such as hourly West Hempstead service to Atlantic Terminal, sending off-peak Far Rockaway & Hempstead Branch trains to Manhattan opposed to Brooklyn, enhanced reverse-peak service on all branches, etc. However, the new timetables weren’t all good and have been plaguing riders (especially riders on Diesel Branches, Brooklyn, Hunterspoint Avenue & Long Island City) with many problems such as uneven gaps, very little (almost fully decimated) through service to Brooklyn, and the removal of timed-transfers (which is arguable). Not only that, but, the railroad gave no improvement to diesel territory service (with no additional dual-mode service along with very little increase in trains, almost all just time refinements), very little additional peak service to Long Island overall, and the Port Washington Branch is probably the worst of the problems with terrible distribution of trains to both city terminals and because the line doesn’t pass through Jamaica which makes things that more difficult, they’ve done little to provide connections to the other terminal at Woodside.
Now, it’s come to my plan. I've been working on a project over the last 10 months or so to revamp the LIRR's Post-ESA Timetables, and I will try my best to fix all the problems that the current schedules bare as well as commuter complaints.
First of all, I will completely start fresh and throw out the old timetables, in place of new timetables in a fresh excel workbook, (with a new & improved timetable design that greatly improves upon the LIRR’s standard design based mainly off Metro-North’s design) and in doing this I will start fresh with a set of new service patterns, along with some of the older ones from the current and prior schedules. Tomorrow I will begin with the easiest branch, The Port Washington Branch, and work my way up to the crazy Babylon Branch and Mainline.
As far as the page layout goes, each page will begin with some information on the branch, and how I plan to make the timetable service layout. The next section will be called “Key Assumptions” which will layout some basic things (such as infrastructure) that need to be in place (I tried to minimize this as much as possible) in order for these new timetables to function correctly, along with “Service Guidelines” which will list some basic information & principals for how peak & off-peak service will work.
I will try my absolute best to make these timetables as efficient as possible for everyone, but, I guarantee you it will be a challenge to make everything fit together especially at Jamaica, on the mainline, and areas W. of Jamaica, along with during the peak-of-the-peak. Before I start, I’d like to make clear to you that even if the LIRR was to take parts of this schedule and substitute/implement them it would improve service along the line in that area dramatically.
Just to make this clear, (if it’s not already), none of these timetables or this document is official LIRR (or MTA) material. I am hoping the railroad will at least look at and maybe adopt some of the service changes, if not completely implementing these schedules depending on the outcome of them. I will try my best to represent the best use of LIRR infrastructure currently, and whether or not they agree with what I think is not known, (but with the state of the railroad right now, I don’t like my chances).
While making these timetable document pages, I will try my best to explain my reasoning for things, as well as the service patterns, but time simply doesn’t permit me to explain every little tweak and oddity that occurs in the schedules. I will also try my best to not make tiny (or even major) typos while making these timetables, but due to the shear amount of edits that will need to be made to the excel spreadsheet, it’s very likely some will come up. And I’ve also tried to find and think of everything, but I’m not aware of the needs of everyone, and I cannot find every grammar mistake that comes up. but if you spot a mistake or have any questions/comments/concerns please feel free to e-mail me at gavin.s.wilcox@gmail.com.
I have set up this page on the site as the "table of contents" or "database" for the project and will list links to each of the branches (in order to when made) timetables. Also, when I publish each branch's timetable and publish it, I do not intend for that to be the end of that timetable, as I work on other branches I will most likely have to make dozens of revisions to make trains fit together. At one point, after everything is completed, I will throw together one final book that will feature all of the timetables and service explanations, however, that will be a long time from now as a million different revisons will occur before then (it's just obvious!!!). But, anyways, let us start with the Port Washington Branch!