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August 23, 2010
LIRR Crippled by Small Fire
The Wall Street Journal
by Andrew Grossman and Kavita Mokha
Take heart, stranded Long Island Railroad commuters! While you were standing on the Ronkonkoma train for three hours with hundreds of other sardines, or scouting for a nice patch of floor on which to spend the night in Penn Station, you could take solace in the fact that we taxpayers gave Bruce Ratner a 22-year-mortgage for 80% of the already-more-than-half-off sweetheart deal the MTA gave him on the Vanderbilt Yard. So what if they're still using pulleys and levers to switch trains from one track to another?
The Long Island Rail Road planned to cancel a one-quarter of its usual Tuesday morning service after a small electrical fire in an outmoded control tower paralyzed the nation's largest commuter railroad Monday, stranding thousands for hours before limited service was restored.
About 100,000 people use the LIRR during the morning and evening rush hours. The railroad planned to run about 60% of trains during the Tuesday evening rush hour. The delays and cancellations could last for much of the week as workers repair the control tower, the railroad said late Monday.
The fire broke out just before 11 a.m. when a power cable that feeds the third rail near Jamaica station shorted out—possibly because of Sunday's heavy rains—sparking a blaze in a nearby control tower. The tower, a relic of the early 20th century that featured pulleys and levers that switch trains from one track to another, is at a key junction just east of Jamaica where city-bound trains on 10 of the railroad's 11 branches converge. Only the Port Washington branch was unaffected.
The railroad halted all service on those 10 branches. Most trains pulled into stations, where passengers waited for hours. There, many said, confusion reigned. Rick Jerothe's 10:11 a.m. train from Ronkonkoma—which was supposed to meet a connecting train at Jamaica that would take him to Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal—instead stopped at Floral Park, on the Nassau County/Queens line.
Mr. Jerothe, a 45-year-old executive at a medical transportation company, had an important meeting about generators at ambulance depots that he needed to attend. Instead, he said he heard conflicting announcements about possible bus service that never came and got little help from the train's crew.
Posted by eric at August 23, 2010 11:10 PM