Interlocking Walkthrough: QUEENS

In this interlocking walkthrough, we will once again take a look at a busy interlocking located near Jamaica Station. This one is the long and extensive QUEENS interlocking, which, spans the entire length of 3 stations. Not only is it a rather large and complex interlocking, but it's also important as it marks the start of four-track territory on the Main Line, upgraded from 3 east of Floral Park.

QUEENS Interlocking hops over the border between Queens and Nassau County, where it switches right before Elmont station. As you can see in the diagram below, QUEENS interlocking is massive, spanning just under a mile long. This shows the impressive length between stations in this area with them being under .3 miles apart each.

While I can't find a diagram of QUEENS, and I don't have time to make one (it's finals week for me and I got a lot going on), here's a birds-eye view of the peak of it just before Elmont. If you’d like to see the rest, I recommend pulling it up in Google Earth and you can use it as a reference as we go through the interlocking.

Before we begin the interlocking tour, it's very important to note that techinally, two routes pass through the interlocking. The Main Line (trains coming onto or off of the three-track Main Line out towards Hicksville), and the Hempstead Branch (trains merging onto or merging of off the Main Line at Floral Park coming from/towards Hempstead).

We'll begin by looking at the Main Line, heading eastbound. As said previously, the interlocking begins just east of Queens Village.

Switches

Let’s start at the eastern end of QUEENS interlocking, and we’ll start by looking at the Main Line considering that’s the route that the majority of the trains run on. The interlocking begins just west of Floral Park, and there aren’t any switches (on the Main Line portion) until a bit west of Bellerose, where there’s a crossover from Mainline 3 over to Mainline 1, then another one shortly afterwards back to Mainline 3. The goal of those crossovers is to take a train onto or off of the third track. They do this during the morning rush hour for some of those New Hyde Park locals that have to run express after there towards Jamaica, they use the first switch mentioned to get onto the third track and bypass Elmont and the other eastern Queens stations. The second switch allows trains that were routed down the 3rd track to stop at Elmont.

So, at this point, we’ve now reached the Elmont platform. We now pass through Elmont, and soon after we leave Elmont, we encounter a series of four switches, each one timed perfectly after another, from Hempstead 1 all the way to Mainline 3. The goal of these switches, before Elmont opened was to bring westbound Hempstead branch trains from the westbound Hempstead Branch track all the way to the westbound Main Line track as to allow for Hempstead Branch trains to stop there. However, when Elmont opened, it basically became the new Queens Village and therefore, as you’ll see in a minute, this move was duplicated before Elmont. After those switches, there’s one final crossover from Mainline 1 to Mainline 3 before we platform at Queens Village.

Now, let’s take a look at the Hempstead Branch routings. Once the Hempstead Branch merges onto the Main Line, things continue normally through Floral Park, until we reach the western end of the platform where there’s a switch from Hempstead 2 (the eastbound track) to Hempstead 1 (the westbound track), before those tracks travel the short distance to Bellerose, and through it, once we get halfway to Elmont station, is where the first series of crossovers (from Hempstead 1 all the way to Mainline 3 that I discussed earlier starts. Finally, just west of Elmont, the Belmont Park Branch splits off heading towards it on the Hempstead 2 eastbound track. It then merges on again later as part of the other end of the spur a couple hundred feet to the west.

So there’s a little general overview of all the different pairs of routings through QUEENS.

Towers

Originally,  there was a QUEENS Tower, which controlled the operations of this busy interlocking, but it closed in 2020 and operations were switched over to JCC Interlocking in Jamaica.

Borders

The mighty QUEENS interlocking is bordered by HOLLIS or HALL interlockings to the west, depending on which track your positioned on it's bordered by NASSAU interlocking to the east if you are heading on the Main and by GARDEN if your routed on the Hempstead Branch. 

Anyways, I'm sorry this interlocking walkthrough was so weak and put together at the last minute, I wanted to get something out today but I've been very busy since it's the last full week of school before finals and it's been difficult to find time. I hope you enjoy this read while I'm getting an award at my awards ceremony!

The Belmont Problem

For years, there's been talk of providing full-time service to the tiny spur station known as Belmont Park. Even before the new UBS Arena, and the Belmont Park Redevelopment project, it's still been on people's wishlists as a park-and-ride facility.

Local officials from several levels of government— including the Town of Hempstead, and county/state legislatures have called on the MTA LIRR to establish full-time service to the spur station in the past. They have said it would provide more rail options for those who live in Elmont, Franklin Sq, and the unincorporated areas of North Valley Stream. These communities do not have their own rail stations, and parking at other nearby stations in western Nassau is limited and restricted to local residents, so if you live in these areas your largely shut-out from rail service, besides the one Elmont-UBS Arena Station which only gets 8 peak trains, and many of those go to Brooklyn.

By unlocking the large, underused parking lots at Belmont Park and allowing riders from both Western Nassau as well as Eastern Queens (where there are limited transit options as well) to park and ride on the LIRR, the MTA could expand access to a much larger potential ridership base in Eastern Queens and Western Nassau County, which both have very limited transit access, along with additional opportunities for those who drive to Manhattan.

For the retail and entertainment complex, Elmont-UBS Arena station is virtually useless. With most of the activity centered on the large south parking lot south of Hempstead Turnpike, the current Elmont station is nearly a mile-long hike from the retail complex. 

To add, both the retail shops and the UBS Arena are both reasonably closer to Belmont Park then to Elmont-UBS Arena, and while the LIRR does run shuttles during events, I think everyone can agree that it's much more sensible for people to be able to walk then to have to bare the burden of providing shuttle buses every event.

Therefore, I've concurred that it's much easier for people to get train service to Belmont Park then to Elmont-UBS Arena. I definitely think some rough form of full-time train service to Belmont Park spur station would be greatly appreciated in both the short and long-terms.

If the railroad does run a reasonably frequent service between Belmont Park and the western terminals, it could offload stops at Queens Village, Hollis, and Hillside (if needed), and all 3 of the Mainline stops (Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, and Woodside) onto trains to/from the spur station, that way the railroad could keep trains bound for other more important places moving, and it might allow the busy Ronkonkoma trains to drop Kew Gardens and Forest Hills which drastically slows down running times. 

Because of Belmont's close location to city terminals, improving service to the spur station might not need to many crew and equipment resources, trains that go out east can bounce back to Belmont Park for a second or third trip when they might not be able to make it all the way back to Babylon, Ronkonkoma, or Far Rockaway with enough time before the end of the rush hour.

A dormant spur

These calls for full-time service at the station have been ignored by the LIRR, which has never thought much of the spur. The "Manhattan & Ronkonkoma Railroad" seams perfectly content with letting Belmont Park wither and die by providing the bare minimum of service to the spur station for events, and by spending $106 million on a brand new mainline station that while is very nice, is literally in line of sight of 4 other stations, and isn't as close as Belmont Park is to these events. I would not be surprised if the LIRR seeks to abandon the spur in the near future.

The railroad has generally just ignored these requests, but it has offered a handful of excuses, too. These have ranged from limited western terminal capacity (which isn't an issue now that we have Grand Central Madison/ESA), as well as risks of congestion @ QUEENS interlocking as trains slowly crawl onto and off the spur. The new station, Elmont- UBS Arena, on the mainline, is located nearly 3-quarters of a mile from the arena, and even further from the retail complex, and it will slow down the commutes of everyone who passes through the area.

While you can argue that by providing additional service to the spur station, you'd be effectively forfeiting a slot that could be used to serve more riders coming from stations' further east, I believe the idea is still plausible. While full-time service to Belmont Park would mean a slight sacrifice to frequency further east along the Main Line, I strongly believe that by offloading local stops onto Belmont Park trains would not only make these trains much more useful, but it would also allow for suburban trips (i.e Ronkonkoma, Hempstead, and Huntington trips) to be faster, since these trips would be able to dump stops at Queens Village, Hollis, maybe even Hillside, and far few trains on all the branches to/from Eastern LI would need to bother stopping at the local stops along the Main Line between Jamaica and New York.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that providing some sort of full-time service to Belmont Park would not only be beneficial for nearby residents, but also for the entire railroad. Not only would it provide better service for residents of Eastern Queens and Western Nassau, but it will also allow for faster suburban trips if used properly, and it will allow for quicker access to events at the nearby arena.