Report from the rails: LIRR commuters speak out

After Monday's electrical fire crippled the Long Island Rail Road system, some commuters faced with slow and complicated routes between home and office found new ways to cope Tuesday.

Rather than chance a snarled LIRR commute into Manhattan, John Zanussi opted to work Tuesday from his home in Amityville. Aware of continued service disruptions, he said he didn't want to risk an hour-and-a-half one-way trip turning into three hours or more.

A Web developer with a monthly train ticket, Zanussi said he's already set up to work from home on days the commute looks iffy. He can log into his office computer, access files and communicate with colleagues by instant message. As a result, he said, "Working from home is pretty much exactly like working from the office, just not IN the office."

He said he was fortunate on Monday when LIRR commuters were taken by surprise by halted service in the wake of an electrical fire in Jamaica. He had taken the day off to celebrate his 24th birthday. "I got really lucky," he said.

- Patricia Kitchen

Tatiana Smith was so worried about a long commute separating her from her infant daughter Bella that she left her Manhattan office on Monday at 3:30 p.m. arriving at her Huntington home at 7 p.m. after spending hours on the subway and buses.

"I have a 3½-month-old that I spend 12 hours away from while I'm at work because of additional travel time. There is no way that I would sacrifice any more time away from her by sitting on the train" during the limited service, she said in an e-mail.

Smith, 28, decided to drive to her job as a Web designer Tuesday. "The drive into the city was horrible, with traffic on the [Long Island Expressway] this morning," she said. "I left for work at 7:45 a.m. and got into the office at 5 after 9 a.m."

Though she doesn't enjoy driving in the city, she vowed to do so while the train problems continued.

- Sophia Chang

Hoping to avoid the crowd at rush hour, Ron Polon of Woodmere, left work a little early Tuesday. He got on the information booth line at Penn Station to ask about his 3:55 p.m. Far Rockaway train, but got conflicting and confusing information from two clerks.

"It's confusing, to say the least," Polon said. "These two people don't have the same answer. That's frustrating."

Another LIRR employee told Polon to take the subway to Brooklyn, about 35 minutes away, to catch the Far Rockaway train. But the employee did not know what time the Far Rockaway train leaves the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn.

"Why is that so difficult, to come up with the times?" Polon said. "They had all day to do it."

In the end, Polon decided to take the Port Washington line - the only branch that has operated on normal service because it does not go through Jamaica, where the electrical fire damaged switch signal wires - and have his wife drive from the South Shore to the North Shore to pick him up.

- Chau Lam