LIRR reports best January since 2012 for on-time trains, aided by milder weather

The Long Island Rail Road, aided by a mild winter, had its best January on-time performance in eight years, according to new statistics.

LIRR president Phillip Eng gathered with other Metropolitan Transportation Authority leaders in Manhattan on Tuesday to discuss improvements in reliability throughout the MTA, including the LIRR, where 93.3% of trains ran on time last month, as compared to 92.7% in January 2019..

The railroad’s best January performance since 2012 came in a month when Islip had an average temperature 6.8 degrees above normal, and in which snowfall totals fell 4.2 inches below average, according to the National Weather Service.

Eng attributed some of the improved performance to his LIRR Forward service initiative, which aims to address the causes of some of the railroad’s most persistent delays, including weather response and problems caused by aging infrastructure. Eng said the effort, begun in 2018, is yielding "real, tangible, measurable improvements."

“These gains are the direct result of all the hard work accomplished over the last two years,” said Eng, crediting the "hard work of our employees who rise to the challenge every day.”

The MTA also highlighted improvements at its New York City Transit subway system, which posted its best January on-time numbers since 2013, and at the Metro-North, which ran 97.4% of its trains on time in January, the highest of any month since April 2014.

The LIRR noted that rush-hour trains operating at their full-length increased 2.1 percentage points in January over the prior year, to 99.1%. And canceled trains fell to 42, from 65 last January. The improvements came even as the railroad took on a record level of infrastructure work that required several major service outages, LIRR officials said.

According to the LIRR, a train is late only if it arrives at its final destination six minutes or more after its scheduled time.

Peter Haynes, president of the LIRR Commuters Campaign, an advocacy group, said that bragging about improved on-time performance during a particularly mild winter is disingenuous.

“The commuter experience has been better than normal. And I attribute the vast majority of that to the weather being much better than previous winters,” Haynes said. “We had practically no snow this January.”

The January figures follow a trend of improving metrics for the LIRR, which last month reported an annual on-time performance of 92.4% in 2019, its best in three years.

Ridership was up in January to 7,171,719, an increase of 0.1% over last year. The railroad carried 91.1 million riders in 2019, the most in 70 years.

Farmingdale commuter Eliana Themistocleous said she has "noticed an improvement," but she still deals with regular delays, crowding and short trains.

"It's not great. I've missed, like, so many events," said Themistocleous, 52, who has been riding the railroad for about 30 years. "I take an earlier train just to make sure I get there on time, and then you still have those crazy delays … I don't find the train to be reliable at all."

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.