Lynbrook, East Rockaway residents feeling impact of Long Island Railroad delays

The frustration in Sharyn Mielinis’s voice was evident as she stood on the platform at the East Rockaway Long Island Rail Road station during the morning rush hour last Friday, recounting her frequent experiences with LIRR delays and cancellations because of issues at Pennsylvania Station.

Mielinis is an office manager in Manhattan, and takes the train to and from Penn every weekday. She said she is often late in picking up her son, Patrick, from Rhame Avenue Elementary School because of LIRR signal problems, track issues and other mechanical delays.

“I should be getting off the train at 6:05 [p.m.],” she said. “Lots of times, my train is canceled, I come late or I just barely get him.” Mielinis, who lives in Lynbrook, said there are many times when her son has to find other ways to get home — sometimes walking or riding his bike.

She added that she also coaches an East Rockaway Little League softball team, and was recently late to practice because of a long delay. “I had 15 girls and their parents set to meet me at the school,” she said, “and I was stuck in the tunnel with no reception on my phone to tell people that I wasn’t going to be there until later and to start without me. It’s very frustrating.”

This summer, the situation might very well get worse for Mielinis and tens of thousands of other Long Islanders who rely on the LIRR to get in and out of Manhattan. Amtrak, which has owned and operated Penn Station since 1976, plans to take as many as three tracks out of service for weeks at a time as part of repairs scheduled to take place between July 7 and Labor Day. To make matters worse, the project will not include upgrades to tracks that are regularly used by the LIRR.

Since the repairs — which include the replacement of wooden ties, rails and switches in a configuration at the western end of Penn Station known as the “A interlocking” — will be done to tracks frequented by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains, the LIRR will have to share tracks it usually has to itself with those trains, according to Newsday.

Wick Moorman, the president and CEO of Amtrak, said that the upgrades are necessary because the equipment has become antiquated. The work, which was originally scheduled to take place over a two- to three-year period, follows two train derailments and myriad equipment malfunctions. Moorman said that Amtrak would try its best to mitigate delays.

“It will be all hands on deck as we undertake these major renewal projects,” he said in a statement. “We are going to do all we can to get this work done quickly and to minimize disruptions to passengers.”

According to a published report, improvements on the east side of Penn, where the LIRR operates, are scheduled to be done on weekends over the next year. However, President Trump has proposed a $760 million cut to Amtrak’s budget, which could affect the company’s plans — including its proposed $23 billion Gateway project to build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

The news that Long Islanders will be affected by this summer’s work, while not seeing any of its benefits, has sparked outrage from State Sen. Todd Kaminsky and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Kaminsky, who organized a rally of LIRR commuters in Rockville Centre on May 13 to protest poor service and to demand Amtrak’s ouster as Penn Station’s operator, has expressed his frustration directly to the corporation.

“I have reached out to Amtrak for clarification,” Kaminsky said, “because this sounds to me like they want Long Island commuters to have all the inconvenience that comes with summer reductions without any of the improvements to the infrastructure that Long Island riders rely upon.”

Kaminsky has also co-sponsored legislation that would authorize the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to cease payments to Amtrak for the use of tracks at Penn Station until the station’s on-time performance reached 95 percent. The funds would instead be used to refund tickets for LIRR and MTA riders inconvenienced by delays this summer. The bill was approved, 55 to 6, by the Senate, but needs to be sponsored by a member of the Assembly to move forward. As of press time, no one from the Assembly had sponsored it.

In May, Cuomo announced the formation of a task force to tackle emergency infrastructure issues in and around Penn Station. He also proposed three potential solutions to issues at the station: that either New York state or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey take over the station’s operations, or that Amtrak use a private contractor to operate Penn, as it does at many of its terminals across the country. The long-term goal would be to eventually combine Penn with the Farley Train Hall, the new LIRR concourse and the Gateway Tunnel to create a unified transit hub.

Cuomo recently referred to the upcoming Penn Station plans as the “summer of hell” for commuters. Many of them got a preview of what he was talking about on May 10, when Amtrak-related signal trouble resulted in the cancellation of nearly 80 trains.

State Assemblyman Brian Curran, a Lynbrook resident, said he constantly has issues with the LIRR. “The trains are consistently delayed and not on time, and that’s not even accounting for all of the cancellations on the routes for the last three weeks,” Curran said while waiting for a train at the Lynbrook station.

Caleb Lavengood, a Rockville Centre resident who works in the city as a theater designer, also bemoaned the problems. “Clearly, the MTA and me have different interpretations of what ‘on time’ means,” he said.

For locals like Sharyn Mielinis, it doesn’t matter how the problems at Penn are solved. They just want them solved. “Fix it,” she said. “Once and for all, just fix it. And then maintain it.”