The Long Island Rail Road’s new schedules- just announced at the board meeting yesterday, finally bring much-needed tweaks to schedules.
While the LIRR has added some very desperate and much needed tweaks, they haven’t dug any deeper to really solve the route causes of the overcrowding and delays nor have they sought to actually provide more options. The truth is, Long Island is known for having some of the best beaches in the world, and the LIRR should try to match that by providing the best transportation to those beaches.
Schedule Padding
The LIRR has added one-additional minute of running time between Ronkonkoma and Central Islip for trains 2017 through 1031. They've also given all Montauk westbound trains one additional minute of running time between Montauk and Amagansett, same being said with the Oyster Bay Branch with all those westbounds getting an additional minute between Oyster Bay and Locust Valley. The agrevating thing about this is that this schedule padding isn't needed- firstoff westbound Montauk trains constantly arrive in Amagansett 1,2,3 or even 4 minutes early, and while it's bit tighter with Ronkonkoma trains, they still normally arrive either early or on-time. I will admit I see them with some of the padding on Summer Sundays, but besides that, they shouldn't be wasting time padding trains that have ran perfectly fine for 2 years.
South Fork
The LIRR’s seasonal service to the Hamptons and Montauk is back- and the railroad has made some changes to improve summer service! Remember train #6005, the 11:37am out of Montauk? You may remember that it used to always run late and overcrowded and more often than not got extended to Penn Station because it ran with 12-car dual-mode equipment and way to many passengers to try to get off the platform and onto other busy trains into New York. With these new schedule changes, train 6005 is now running to New York as train 6095 on Sundays, this is something I predicted. In addition, the lesser-known train 6013, the 4:18pm from Montauk is now also extended to Penn Station, a move I can definitely see. They also updated the times to include additional padding for many of the summer Sunday westbound trains, and while I normally don’t support schedule padding to too much of a degree, this is something that had been needed for a long time.
While many of you will remember the LIRR’s various summer offerings, I’ll go over them since they made a couple of changes. On Fridays, the LIRR adds a couple of trains:
- Train 89 departs Patchogue at 3:17pm, stopping at Sayville, Bay Shore, and Babylon only.
- Relief Train 66 departs Babylon at 12:05pm, stops at Bay Shore, Sayville, and Patchogue only.
- Train 12 departs Hunterspoint Avenue at 1:11pm, stopping at Jamaica before running express to Westhampton, before calling at all local stops at Montauk.
- Train 16, The Cannonball, departs Penn Station at 4:07pm, runs non-stop to Westhampton, before stopping at Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, and Montauk. They’ve added additional padding at most of the stops, bringing the final arrive time into Montauk to 6:56pm, eight minutes later than last year.
- Dual-mode train 20, the 5:13pm from Penn Station to Montauk will run 5-days a week for the first time, replacing train 42 permanently for at least the summer.
- Train 24, the holiday-only 7:19pm express from Jamaica to Montauk has been annulled from the schedule with no reason provided.
 |
| The first run of The Cannonball thru Sayville in 2024 |
One of the nicest upgrades with this new schedule is the LIRR’s new shift to focus more on providing better summer-service earlier in the week. Currently, the LIRR’s summer-schedule is much more oriented around people who are leaving for the South Fork later in the afternoon on Fridays, however changing patterns after COVID-19 with more people working from home more have caused many people to want to head out east earlier in the week (such as on Thursdays and even Wednesdays) and “work from home” from wherever they’re staying on Thursday and/or Friday. While I’m not trying to conclude that the LIRR’s capacity on the Montauk Branch isn’t busy, there’s been a decent shift to service earlier in the week and the LIRR should look to grow it, something they are finally doing.
As part of the reworked timetable project, I will continue to work to fine-tune summer service on the Montauk Branch until I get it right.
Summer Sundays
Service on the Montauk Branch on Summer Sundays last year was a HUGE problem last year, with many trains running late and overcrowded on various weekends last year. There’s not much the LIRR can do about this- as on Summer Sundays westbound service is already running at hourly headways which is at capacity. The LIRR should really look to fine-tune service at this point, since the most they can do is possibly add one or two relief trains out of Southampton to help balance service a bit. This years Sunday return schedule offers the same suite of trains as last year, however they have padded a bit more to help with slow-loading something that should greatly improve OTPs. They also have two popular trains, trains 6005 and 6013 (the 11:37am and 4:18pm trains out of Montauk respectively) run to Penn Station, to help with overcrowding and provide an easier option by not requiring 12 full cars worth of people to trundle off at Jamaica and attempt to fit into an MU headed for Penn Station. In my reworked timetable project, I predicted they’d extend #6005 to Penn Station, as its something they did routinely last year, and I think it’s a great thing that is zero-cost but will improve service for everyone. The extra trains that operate out of The Hamptons on Summer Sundays are:
- Train 6005, the 11:36am train out of Montauk, making all local stops to Speonk before running non-stop to Jamaica, arriving there at 2:18pm. This train has now been renumbered to #6095, and extended to Penn Station, arriving there at 2:41pm.
- Train 6007, the 1:46pm train out of Montauk, making all local stops to Speonk before running non-stop to Jamaica, arriving there at 4:20pm.
- Train 6009, the 3:25pm train out of Southampton, making all local stops to Speonk before running non-stop to Jamaica, arriving there at 5:14pm.
- Train 6013, the 4:17pm train out of Montauk, making all local stops to Mastic-Shirley, then Patchogue and non-stop to Jamaica, arriving there at 6:56. This train has now been extended to Penn Station, arriving there at 7:22pm.
- Train 6017, the 6:21pm train out of Montauk, making all local stops to Westhampton before Jamaica and Penn Station, arriving there at 9:10pm.
In my opinion, it’s imperative to provide hourly-service going westbound from the Hamptons on Summer Sundays to avoid points of dangerous overcrowding. One trend is that many people tend to spend a week out on the South Fork, therefore alleviating the need to take a later train in the afternoon. Therefore, those people are overcrowding trains #6001, #6005, and #6007, putting extreme stress on them. In my opinion, The LIRR should look to take the equipment of train 6007, and instead use it on a new train, departing Montauk around 9:30am to firstly provide a better option for people in the Hamptons looking to head into the city for a day, while also cutting that four-hour gap that puts #6005 under so much stress in half. Train 6007 has never been the busiest train ever, and I think the equipment would be much better used on that.
I look forward to seeing how these changes and the additional padding will affect train 6005 and its running time as it and its overcrowding was a big talk of last year.
North Fork
The LIRR’s new 2025-updated schedules make no changes to North Fork Service, another area I feel has extreme potential for growth. This will be talked about more in the North Fork Reworked East Side Access timetable.
 |
Summer Weekends
Long Beach
The LIRR has made no changes to service to Long Beach, with the same super-express trip departing Penn Station at 9:33am, making Jamaica and Long Beach only at 10:20am. The return-trip departs Long Beach at 4:28pm, only 10-minutes before the local, making it much less useful this year.
I believe the Long Island Rail Road could make more effort to improve summer-service to/from Long Beach, which would be a huge win for both the railroad and the town of Long Beach, and this will be discussed in the Long Beach Branch Reworked Timetable post.
Jones Beach/Freeport
The Long Island Railroad sneakily cut the three eastbound extra trains to Freeport, in addition to the extra westbound trains.
In conclusion, while I believe the LIRR made some targeted changes to improve service, I believe there’s still a long way to go and in addition to the discussions regarding Summer Service in my Reworked Timetable Project, I may write further posts further diving into summer service specifically.