The last time we checked in on the Long Island Rail Road, we toured their newest rail station up close and personal. A new station built right under Grand Central Terminal to the delight of all of New York City. Our trip was notable for how quiet and eerily empty the newly built rail station was before it began accepting passengers from all LIRR lines late last month. We figured it was only a matter of time before business started picking up.
The thing is, we might have missed the mark on where this spike in activity would take place. It turns out the bulk of this uptick in foot traffic took place not at Grand Central Madison but roughly 12 miles (19.3 km) away at the LIRR station in the Queens neighborhood of Jamaica. At a station not known as being quaint or low-energy, mad dashes for trains that look more like the Tokyo Metro than New York City have been the new norm since GSM began full service.
A grand opening gone up in smoke
For thousands of New York City commuters, the diversion of cars usually bound for Penn Station on Manhattan's West Side or Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal to GCM on the East Side has led to a bottleneck the MTA planners for the East Side Access project never expected. Purported miscalculations in the number of rail cars necessary to service an influx of traffic at GCM appear to have led to disastrous results.
A full-on onslaught of problems has been heavy and forthcoming, seemingly from the moment full-branch service on February 27th, 2023. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York was among the first passengers to pass through the freshly completed LIRR line of the 63rd Street Tunnel across the East River back in January 2023. In some form or another, NYC has aspired to bring LIRR service to Manhattan's East Side since the late 1950s.
As the 63rd Street lines of the New York City subway bustle away in the tunnel above, riders of the F-line Express and local trains would be none the wiser to the bottleneck taking place below them one borough to the east. 11 separate branches to service across the spectrum of LIRR stations spanning 324 miles (521.4 km) of commuter rail is a tall order for just one major terminal. It appears an attempt to split the LIRR fleet between two separate terminals in the same borough has led to some oversights in lesser-served train lines.
Photo: MTA
Most notably, commuters on the lesser-served Oyster Bay line find their already below-average commute times significantly increased thanks to the bottleneck emanating from Jamaica station. This bespoke 14.68-mile (23.6 km) stretch of rail sees consistent service from DE30AC diesel-electric locomotives and DM30AC dual-mode locomotives pulling C3 bilevel coaches, which seldom travel through Manhattan's lower-level train tunnels.
A complete nightmare for some commuters
With a transfer at Jamaica Station all but guaranteed except with on-peak express trains, all the unpleasantness associated with communicating to NYC on the Oyster Bay line have been multiplied since GSM opened. Reports from the New York Post that the MTA knew diverting rail cars for the then incomplete East Side Access project could cause delays as early as ten years ago isn't helping a situation many argue should have been handled considerably better.
MTA simulations predicting a 93 percent on-time performance during the period of service disruption at Jamaica Station before Grand Central Madison opened have been met with real-life results considerably less impressive. The latest estimates peg this number at just 72 percent of trains have arrived on time at Jamaica Station since full service to Grand Central Madison began.
A solution involving replacing low-speed signal switches that prevent trains exceeding 15 mph (24 kph) through the station with faster ones allowing for 30 mph (48 kph) travel, has been in the works since 2020. But work isn't expected to be completed on this project until at least 2027. For now, overly crowded LIRR trains are forced to trundle through the station grossly overladen with passengers at a speed matched by the average cyclist.
Photo: Benny Kirk/ autoevolution
Where to go from here
After a staggering $11 billion has been spent boring a hole across the East River for the LIRR to use, the inability to compensate for an increase of 635 trains per day to more than 900 is a sign the MTA's calculations for how Grand Central Madison's service would flow when it opened were greatly exaggerated at best. In the worst case, they were downright wrong.
For the moment, the MTA is hoping to satiate the anger of greatly annoyed Long Island commuters by comprehensively re-working train arrival timetables to bring relief to lesser-used but still important lines such as Oyster Bay. It's anyone's guess whether these changes will have a positive effect on the impact of Grand Central Madison.
Should the new station take on a poor reputation in spite of every effort to make GCM a world-beating rail terminal, it'd be nothing short of a savage indictment on New York City's ability to remain a public works infrastructure titan in the 21st century. That's a can of worms nobody wants to open.
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