LIRR fixes ticket machine problem

A communications network glitch that kept Long Island Rail Road passengers from purchasing tickets with credit or debit cards for several hours Sunday derailed some passengers' trips to the city and left commuters who had hoped to get a jump on buying their monthly LIRR passes out of luck.

LIRR spokesman Salvatore Arena said the problem, which originated with the Sprint telephone connection that enabled the railroad to communicate with the banks and affected both the LIRR and Metro-North, began at about 11 a.m. and was resolved before 2:30 p.m., when the LIRR switched to a backup connection with Verizon.

During the outage, the onboard purchase surcharge was waived - but the network failure sent frustrated riders at LIRR stations across Long Island searching for the closest ATM.

"This is ridiculous," said a fed-up Barbara Damon, 65, of Mineola. "It's 2011 - this should not be happening."

Ryan McDonald, 20, of Kings Park missed the 12:31 p.m. train to Penn Station because of the long lines at ticket machines in Mineola. Two ticket machines had stopped working. "By the time I got to the ATM, the train already left," he said. "This is crazy."

At Hicksville, the LIRR station agent was swamped with customers looking to purchase monthly tickets before the Monday commute, only to be told the railroad could only accept cash or checks.

"They just raised fares and now this," said Jenny Pouech, 35, of Hicksville, who waited 15 minutes on line only to be told she would need cash. "The least they could do was put a sign up, but they didn't even do that."

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Rosemarie Hegel, 44, of Wantagh drove to the Bellmore station with her husband and children Sunday after finding the ticket machines at the Wantagh station were not taking credit cards. "We drove over here hoping that the problem would only be at that station, but here we are and the machines still won't take our cards," she said.

Hegel said she tried to pay the $82 fare for the six of them with a $100 bill, but soon found out the ticket machines didn't take currency that large.

Hegel's husband ended up getting cash and paying for their tickets before their 12:52 p.m. train to Manhattan left the station. As they walked away, they shook their heads in dismay at the pile of $1 coins the machine had given them in change.

Arena apologized for the problem, and said the LIRR informed passengers of the outage through e-mail alerts and repeated announcements at the stations. He said Sundays typically has the lowest ridership of the week - 81,670 passengers - though the number could have been higher Sunday because of the holiday weekend.

The Metro-North outage was fixed about 6 p.m. Sunday, Arena said. Metro-North passengers also were unable to use credit or debit cards Friday and part of Saturday, although Arena said that outage was due to a software problem, not the network problem that hit the system Sunday.

With Zeke Miller

and Josh Seidman