Victims ask why recent fixes weren't done sooner

BY JENNIFER MALONEY | Newsday Staff Writer

January 19, 2007

The Long Island Rail Road in recent months has realigned tracks, shifted platforms and tacked wooden boards to platform edges -- all in a concentrated effort to shrink the dangerous spaces between trains and platforms.

But the ease and simplicity of these techniques -- which railroad officials say do narrow gaps but don't completely solve the problem -- have left victims of gap falls pointing to a missed opportunity. Why, they ask, didn't the railroad do this before Natalie Smead's August death?

Five months later, railroad officials still have not answered that question.

An examination of the track realignment process reveals another missed opportunity: Track resurfacing crews for decades have been measuring the distance between tracks and platforms -- a number that can be used to calculate the gap between platforms and trains -- yet the LIRR never kept the measurements or used them to identify problem gaps.

Taking measures

For decades, the LIRR only occasionally used concrete measures to prevent gap falls, installing lights and wooden boards along platform edges at a handful of stations and assigning a platform conductor to the Syosset station. It chose instead to focus on warning passengers to "Watch the Gap."

In recent months, the railroad has assigned platform conductors to five more stations and has expanded its use of wooden edge boards.

And it has for the first time used track realignment -- a technique used in regular maintenance -- to narrow gaps, shifting tracks closer to platforms at 17 stations since August.

"The idea of making platforms wider by simply putting a piece of wood in is a simple solution," said Joseph Laino, 69, of Mineola, who fell in a gap at Penn Station in 1986. "Why didn't they think about this 20 years earlier?"

The railroad announced yesterday a plan to reduce gaps -- by shifting platforms, realigning tracks and installing edge boards -- on an estimated 38 percent of its platforms by the spring of 2008.

However, measures such as track realignment may have little or no impact on some of the railroad's widest gaps, which occur on sharply curved platforms, railroad officials said.

The LIRR so far has not released the cost of its gap-reduction program, its recent education efforts or future work. LIRR acting president Ray Kenny said the railroad was working to "capture the costs," which have been funded largely through its regular track maintenance budget.

Kenny declined to say why measures such as edge boards -- used widely by the Metro-North Railroad -- weren't employed sooner by the LIRR.

No 'immediate solution'

"We're not going to have an immediate solution or initiative that's going to totally eliminate any of the risk," Kenny said. "But we're just trying to do what we can do. The surfacing [track realignment] is an example of that. It may be only an incremental improvement, but we want to make any improvement we can make."

Plans for more complex measures -- such as refitting trains with wider door steps or installing mechanical gap fillers -- could take longer, LIRR officials said.

"They've taken some very constructive, positive, common-sense steps, but those are the quick fixes," said State Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), who serves on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Capital Project Review Board. "Now what they have to do is look into the more dramatic and, probably, costly aspects of dealing with the problem."

Realigning tracks

Realigning tracks is at best a partial solution to the gap problem, which at the LIRR, includes gaps of up to 151/2 inches on curved platforms and up to 133/4 inches on a straight platform, according to measurements taken by the railroad in September.

In some cases, track realignment can reduce the gap by an inch or two. In other instances, particularly where there are sharp curves, the technique can't be used to reduce the gap at all.