After system changes, LIRR returns to normal Monday

This morning's rush hour commute on the Long Island Rail Road is set to return to normal after the weekend's switching and signal system work meant two days of dramatic service cuts, railroad officials said.

As of Sunday evening, crews had finished 95 percent of the tests they hoped to complete over the weekend at the Jamaica transit hub, said railroad spokesman Joe Calderone.

With fewer trains but advance warnings about delays, far fewer riders rode the trains than on a usual Saturday or Sunday. Sunday, for example, ridership plummeted 54 percent in the morning compared with an average Sunday morning, but ridership rose 43 percent on the Port Washington branch, the only one unaffected by the switching work, Calderone said.

The railroad plans to disrupt service once again, on Nov. 6 and 7, to finish testing of its $56-million computer-based system that's replacing the manually operated lever machines - a system that dates to 1913.

On Day 2 of the cutback weekend, some passengers were scrambling to make sure they could get to where they needed to go.

"Do you know where I get the Long Island Rail Road buses?" an anxious Meredith Faltin asked an LIRR employee at the Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue subway station in Queens Sunday.

"Upstairs! Upstairs!" he said.

SEE PHOTOSLIRR trains and commuters through the years

Faltin, 35, was due in Plainview in a half-hour to coach soccer for kids with autism.

She's usually able to hop aboard the train at Jamaica, but there was, in the words of the big blue signs that have dotted the railroad system, "extremely limited LIRR service."

So before she could get to the soccer field, she had to board a bus to Mineola, where she could catch a train - or maybe a taxi - to Hicksville.

Upstairs, Jarrett Guma was trying to return to his home in Manorville after a visit with friends at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. That meant, instead of taking the Ronkonkoma branch directly from Penn Station, he had to take the subway to Jamaica, where he missed the train he planned to take and was waiting for the 12:15 p.m. instead.

Guma said he had been delayed in August, when an electrical fire forced days of delays. Such problems are expected to be eliminated when the new switching and signaling system is in place.

"It's good that they're fixing it," the engineer, 23, said.

On the train platform, one Manhattan-bound passenger wasn't about to exchange the train for the subway.

"I don't do the subway," Regina Callabrass, 48, a city correction officer who works at Rikers Island and lives in Laurelton, Queens, said while waiting for a train to Penn Station.

She was taking her 14-year-old daughter, Tierra, into the city for an audition.

Even though the testing and delays are an inconvenience, Callabrass said it's all good: Her daughter has an audition and she wasn't going to miss it for the world. Much less a couple of delays.