LIRR to cancel some trains for a month

The Long Island Rail Road will cancel three evening rush hour trains for about a month this summer to allow crews to get some extra work done on the struggling East Side Access project to link the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal, officials said.

To allow for the faster digging of a new tunnel under the busy Harold Interlocking in Queens, the LIRR will take a critical rail switch offline for about four weeks beginning in July. As a result, some trains between Penn Station and Jamaica will be rerouted, and three canceled daily.

LIRR officials said they will release details on the service changes at a June 25 meeting.

The loss of the switch will eliminate routes used by nine trains in the evening peak hours. It also will leave the railroad little wiggle room to adjust to any unanticipated service problems affecting Penn Station during that stretch.

"The greater issue for us is, if anything else happens, then we've lost some redundance and flexibility," LIRR president Helena Williams said at a recent meeting. "Then we would have a significant impact in Penn."

By suspending train service on that key switch, MTA officials say, boring machines will be able to continuously mine a 450-foot tunnel extension near 39th Street, rather than digging in smaller sections.

The decision to reduce service to expedite East Side Access work comes as Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials concluded this month that the project is running a year behind schedule and nearly a billion dollars over budget. The agency plans to take several measures to mitigate the delays and cost overruns, including LIRR service disruptions as needed.

SEE PHOTOSLIRR trains and commuters through the years

MTA chairman Joseph Lhota said that he expects that most of the overrun to be funded in the agency's next capital plan, which will cover infrastructure investments from 2015 to 2019. Typically, capital plans are largely funded through bonding.

Lhota also repeated his criticism of the MTA's past practice of setting unrealistic targets for major projects. Until last year, the MTA was projecting that East Side Access would be completed by 2016 and cost $7.3 billion, even when the agency realized that there was only a 20 percent chance of that.

"I find that hard to believe," Lhota said. "They were taking a risk [and] I think they did it with their eyes fully open."

The $8.24 billion project aims to bring the LIRR to Metro-North's longtime Manhattan terminal by 2019. MTA officials have previously boasted about the stealth nature of the construction, which until now has had little impact on service.

Mark Epstein, chairman of the LIRR Commuter Council, said that he supports efforts to expedite the work, but the LIRR needs to give riders plenty of notice before altering their commutes. "Now, they're really going to be held to the fire, because they're starting to affect people's lives," Epstein said.