Boland's Landing

If you were asked to name every LIRR station, the one you’d probably be most likely to leave out is Boland’s Landing. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be surprised if you haven’t heard of it in the first place. Anyways, Boland's Landing is one of the two lesser-known, and lesser-served employee stops, with it's eastern partner, Hillside, serving the much larger Hillside Maintenance Complex, and therefore, seeing more riders and many more trains then it's eastern partner.

Boland's Landing, which exists with the purpose of serving the Morris Park diesel shops, is one of the oddest, and most obscure of stations on the LIRR. Firstoff, unlike any of the other stations on the railroad, including, Hillside, it doesn't have an actual concrete platform, as instead, it has a wood platform, similarly to Hollis. This station is very lowly-used and since all of the people using it are employees anyway, it's not the end of the world that it's still just a wooden slab. Secondly, It's also the only station on the railroad to only see service on weekdays (I guess excluding Hunterspoint Avenue and Long Island City). 

Thirdly, if you go onto TrainTime and try to buy a ticket/plan a trip to Boland's Landing, you can't do so. This is unusual and this is only seen at this station as even at Hillside where you can't buy tickets, you can still plan a trip there. Therefore, the only way to even see what trains stop there would be to go onto the timetable pdf itself.

Fourthly, Boland's Landing is the one and only flag stop on the railroad. Since so few trains are actually scheduled to bother stopping there, it's a general rule of thumb that an engineer will watch and if he or she sees someone on the platform they'll stop the train and pick them up. This isn't the case at Boland's sister station, Hillside, where trains must stop there, and this is a big NO-NO anywhere else in the system, and, this is a unique trait to Boland's Landing. By the way, you'll be surprised to know that that photo is the only known photograph taken directly on the platform.

And last but not least, fifthly, Boland's Landing doesn't properly appear on the M7's ASI system as when the annoucement "Boland's Landing" is said, it actually appears as Bolands-Employees, and that's an interesting little quirk about the ASI system. Boland's Landing is a 2-car platform, making it the shortest platform (in electric territory from what I know) and the doors typically only get keyed open in the first car anyway, so it's really, really short too!

The LIRR does however publish the schedule for this station and for the other employee stop, Hillside and while passengers aren't allowed to board/detrain here, it's a great tool to pick a train that may actually stop here so you can check it out. Just note that this timetable is updated to when this post was written.

I believe there may be talks to reopen the Woodhaven station which is located undergound near this location, and that may spell the end to this station, I'm just theorizing here, but if that were to be the case that would spell the end of flag stops on the Long Island Railroad.