The Long Island Rail Road is running off the rails

This has been the January of hell.

For Long Island Rail Road riders, every day of 2018 has brought with it new troubles. First, it was the cold and snow. Then Amtrak began track repairs at Penn Station, causing diverted and canceled trains. Then came shortened trains when cars needed maintenance, astonishingly because of residue from fallen leaves. The result: crowded trains.

And that wasn’t all. Riders on the nation’s busiest commuter railroad experienced a seemingly endless series of delays, cancellations and suspensions. There was trouble with equipment, switches and signals, track conditions and broken rails. Communication about it all was neither sufficient nor timely.

The railroad’s performance has been abysmal. The accompanying silence from top LIRR personnel has been deafening. Indeed, it seems a complacency descended over the LIRR after the successful handling of the so-called summer of hell — and stayed with the railroad since. It seems only the riders are outraged.

Even though railroad officials knew leaves would fall, they didn’t adequately prepare for the resulting slime on the rails that makes wheels slip, slide and sometimes flatten, requiring repairs or replacement. Even though they knew Amtrak would start new work, they didn’t do enough to make sure regular operations would go smoothly. Even though the railroad has well-paid workers who should be able to handle routine maintenance and track work, somehow, it couldn’t. And even though the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has the means to communicate within its bureaucracy and with commuters, the agency seemed unable to do either.

After two weeks of commuters issuing a daily primal scream across social media, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota emerged to say something had to change.

He’s right. And the response must be immediate and significant.

The trouble starts at the top. So, a new LIRR must start with new leadership. The MTA is considering replacing top LIRR executives. It’s inevitable. President Patrick Nowakowski was hired in 2014 because he is a civil engineer bringing technical expertise. In reality, he was brought in to replace then-head Helena Williams, who was too outspoken in her advocacy for Long Island’s interests for former MTA head Thomas Prendergast. But Nowakowski has not delivered, or was never allowed to deliver, the needed leadership inside and outside the LIRR. Nowakowski knows about the trouble leaves cause for trains, for instance, but somehow, the problem persisted. Without a strong leader, bureaucrats and union leaders default to their crippled old culture, one defined by inertia. Lhota’s choice should be someone with the ability, as well as the support, to take the megaphone and act like the president.

But a leadership change must be only the first step. Lhota must treat the LIRR with the same urgency with which he tackled the subways. Last summer, Lhota announced a subway action plan to increase reliability and improve the system. The MTA developed a website, a timeline and a clear, written plan. And Lhota has stayed on top of the situation, day in and day out.

Treat the LIRR similarly. Make a grand announcement of an action plan, give it a moniker, and provide a blueprint to address the challenges. Show who’s accountable, and allow that person to be an outspoken advocate. Develop a full online dashboard so riders can track performance, train by train, car by car, station by station. Prepare for how to handle emergencies.

Communication remains an enormous hurdle. It shouldn’t be. When LIRR personnel plan a service change or know there’s a problem, commuters should know, too — right away. When a plan is made at night to change service in the morning, don’t wait until 6 a.m. to tell the world what you knew at 11 p.m. When there’s a problem on one part of a line, workers at another station shouldn’t say a train is on time. Commuters shouldn’t be getting real-time information from other commuters, while receiving outdated, incorrect information from railroad workers, the MTA website or social media. Recognize that executives in Manhattan and Jamaica don’t know what’s happening in Ronkonkoma.

Beyond its day-to-day problems, the LIRR isn’t handling bigger responsibilities well, either. Take positive train control, safety technology that commuter railroads are supposed to install by the end of 2018. As of the third quarter of 2017, the LIRR had installed just 57 percent of its hardware and trained fewer than half of its employees.

Change is possible. It requires new leadership, accountability, training, better metrics, clear standards and massive adjustments to maintenance and communication. It will take an urgency not seen since the summer, one that cannot be short-lived.

Just last week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo praised the LIRR’s ahead-of-schedule work on the double track between Farmingdale and Ronkonkoma and said nearly two dozen station upgrades would be finished this year, too. Give credit where it’s due, but a pretty-looking station isn’t going to help anyone who’s waiting for a train that never comes, or has to jam onto a train with too-few cars.

Get the trains back on track. And keep them there.