Overnight ice resulted in a rough morning commute on LIRR

Well, after yesterday's storm, the LIRR had a slightly rougher time this morning providing the promised full weekday schedule. 

If you've been outside yet today, you'll know it's FREEZING outside (it's in the upper teens), and as you know, when you had a cold night, it's not uncommon, especially on the LIRR, for the switches to freeze, which happened overnight. A couple switches, all of those being at important locations, and as a result, caused delays and even a couple of cancellations throughout the entire morning rush hour:

• There was switch trouble near Mineola which caused delays on the Oyster Bay Branch that resulted in 35-40 minute delays, and to make matters worse, train 505 (the first dual mode out of Oyster Bay) broke down in Oyster Bay which resulted in congestion. They even had to have train 508 (the 6:43a from Jamaica to Oyster Bay) go all the way to Hicksville to make a reverse-move and get around that broken switch. This also later resulted in the entire Main Line getting put in a chokehold as everything got backed up causing an average of 10 minute delays during the height of the morning rush hour.
• There was switch trouble at both Stewart Manor and Elmont-UBS Arena which resulted in train 709, the 7:04am from Hempstead to Atlantic Terminal having to make a reverse-move.

In the end though, you cannot blame the LIRR for this as this is all weather-related. Afterall this was the first real snow of the season and I think it's impressive enough that they were able to run pretty much a full suite of trains for the Monday morning rush hour already, considering when you look at NJTransit, they annulled basically 25% of the rush hour fleet. And really the delays weren't terrible, when you look at it, as only a small handful of trains ran more than 20 minutes late with the worst of the delays being train 508 which arrived Oyster Bay 43 minutes late.