Long Island Rail Road

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Long Island Rail Road route network

The MTA Long Island Rail Road , also abbreviated LIRR ( pronounced "LI-double-R" ), is a railroad company in the United States . It operates a route network on Long Island between New York and its eastern suburbs, which is mainly used by LIRR suburban trains for commuters to and from New York.

The LIRR route network with three main lines and eleven sections and branches has a track length of 956 km (594 miles), there are 124 access points for passenger traffic. It is the most widely used public transport network in North America. In 2017, 89.4 million passengers were carried; an average of 311,100 passengers on weekdays. Freight is on the LIRR network by the New York and Atlantic Railway as franchisees provided.

LIRR is the oldest US railroad company that has operated under the same name since it was founded. It is publicly owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority .

Route network

LIRR route network. Red: passenger traffic, orange: freight traffic only, gray: former route, yellow background: electrified
LIRR train of the M 7 series

Up to a distance of about 70 kilometers from New York, the lines are mostly electrified with 750 V DC busbars arranged on the side of the track and coated from above. The dimensions of the busbars are the same as those of the New York subway , but the voltage is higher. The routes branch out into up to eleven branches. The electrified routes are mainly used by railcars. Trains hauled by diesel or two-engine locomotives are used to operate the more distant routes . In Manhattan , the Long Island Rail Road only uses electric traction vehicles, so that travelers coming from more distant places either have to change trains or use the direct trains hauled by two-power locomotives to reach Manhattan's Penn Station directly. Another two terminus stations are in the New York borough of Queens and one in Brooklyn . The route network is to be expanded by an additional tunnel connection, the East Side Access , to Grand Central Station in New York by the end of 2022 . Furthermore, considerations took place to extend the route ending in Brooklyn through a tunnel into southern Manhattan, which will be followed up with low priority.

The following routes are not fully electrified:

  • Montauk Branch to Montauk (on the south coast in the east), electrified to Babylon
  • Greenport Branch to Greenport (on the north coast in the east), electrified to Ronkonkoma
  • Port Jefferson Branch to Port Jefferson (on the north coast about in the middle), electrified to Huntington
  • Oyster Bay Branch to Oyster Bay (on the north coast, a little west of center), electrified to East Williston

There are plans to electrify the Port Jefferson Branch completely, the Greenport Branch to Riverhead and the Montauk Branch to Patchogue or Speonk.

Nodes and endpoints

The branched network of the LIRR converges at several nodes, of which the Jamaica Station and Penn Station are the most important. While Jamaica is the most important transport hub in east New York and ensures the connection to the New York-John-F.-Kennedy airport via AirTrain JFK , Penn Station is in the center of Manhattan and offers connection to the long-distance traffic of the Amtrak and the network of the New Jersey transit . A direct link to Metro-North Railroad does not currently exist, but is planned for the future at Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal .

Other important endpoints are Atlantic Terminal in Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City Terminal in the district of the same name , as well as Montauk , Greenport and Port Jefferson in the east of Long Island.

Atlantic Avenue Tunnel

The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, also known as the Cobble Hill Tunnel, was almost 500 meters long and was initially built in a cut and arched in 1850. Atlantic Avenue lay above it , which is why the tunnel is occasionally referred to in literature as the world's first subway . However, it was a railway tunnel without stations. It was shut down in 1861.

history

The Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad (B&J), founded on April 25, 1832, opened the first railway line on Long Island on April 18, 1836, which ran about 10 miles from South Ferry in Brooklyn to Jamaica in Queens. Even before the line was completed, the civil engineer David Bates Douglass , employed by B&J, began planning a continuation to the east end of the island in order to shorten the travel time between New York and Boston by combining rail and ferry connections. To this end, Douglass and his financiers founded the Long Island Rail Road on April 24, 1834, which leased the B&J line from December 1, 1836 (retroactively from the day it was opened) and in April 1836 with the construction of a 140 km long line Greenport started. This was gradually opened until July 27, 1844; the continuous connection to Boston with the involvement of ferries from Cornelius Vanderbilt's fleet on August 9, 1844.

Competing combined ship and rail connections and, above all, the opening of the main line of the New York and New Haven Railroad on December 27, 1848 as part of the first continuous rail connection between New York and Boston led to the fact that the original business model of the Long Island Rail Road was followed a few years was no longer sustainable. The route to Greenport, which was built in the then sparsely populated center of Long Island, had hardly any local traffic. The Long Island Rail Road therefore filed for bankruptcy on March 4, 1850, but was able to end the bankruptcy administration in early 1851. In the following decades the route network grew through the construction of branch lines and the takeover of neighboring railway companies. Conrad Poppenhusen , owner of several of these competitors, acquired a majority stake in Long Island Rail Road in early 1876 and took over management of the company. Austin Corbin bought the company in 1880 . Through the investments of Poppenhusen and Corbin as well as the merger with other railway companies of the two investors, the Long Island Rail Road essentially reached its current geographical extent by the end of the 19th century.

In 1900 the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the Long Island Rail Road. This enabled her to reach Manhattan Island by rail from the east as previously only New York Central and New Haven from the north could. All other railway lines ended on the west side of the Hudson River . In Manhattan, the Pennsylvania Railroad opened Penn Station in 1910, including the access routes that run in the tunnel and electrified with direct current busbars. To the west of this station, busbars were switched to overhead contact lines with high-voltage alternating current in 1934, but not on Long Island. In 1926, the LIRR was the first in the United States to use diesel locomotives .

After the Second World War, the LIRR recorded a significant drop in passenger numbers as a result of mass motorization . At the same time, operating costs rose, while expensive investments in infrastructure and vehicles became necessary. Fare increases were ruled out from 1917 to 1947 by the New York Public Service Commission . As a result, the LIRR filed for bankruptcy on May 2, 1949 , but continued to operate.

A commission commissioned by Governor Thomas E. Dewey recommended in 1951 that the LIRR should be taken over by the state, but the State Legislature rejected this. Instead, legislation was drafted with which the LIRR could be restructured in 1954. As a Railroad Redevelopment Corporation , the LIRR was granted twelve years of tax exemptions, permission to raise fares, and the suspension of dividend payments to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Even with these concessions, however, the LIRR only posted profits in individual subsequent years. A study completed in early 1965 again recommended the transmission of the LIRR to the state.

The state of New York and Pennsylvania Railroad then negotiated the purchase price and delivery terms until the beginning of June 1965. The state-owned Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority (MCTA), founded on May 21, 1965, acquired the LIRR for $ 65 million. The acquisition was completed in January 1966. The MCTA became today's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in March 1968 .

Freight transport

LIRR and its predecessor companies also operated freight traffic from the start. In the second half of the 20th century, however, its importance declined both in comparison to the extensive passenger traffic and in comparison to the rest of the USA. The volume fell from 17,131 wagons with 1.1 million tons of cargo in 1987 to 11,683 wagons with 865,857 tons of cargo in 1996, making the rail part of all goods transport on Long Island around one percent.

In the expectation that an external operator would increase the attractiveness of rail freight transport and at the same time allow LIRR to concentrate on its core business, the MTA decided to offer LIRR's freight transport division as a franchise for an initial 20 years. The New York and Atlantic Railway (NYA) of the Anacostia and Pacific Company won the procedure and took over the LIRR freight service in May 1997. The contract was extended for another ten years in 2017. In the first year after the takeover, around 15,000 freight wagons with 1.1 million tons of cargo were transported; In 2018, the NYA reported 20,780 cars a year.

Vehicle fleet

EMD dual-power locomotive DM30AC

On the electric routes, the Long Island Rail Road currently uses multiple units of the series M1 to M3 and M7 , which are largely identical to those of the Metro-North Railroad , only the busbars on the Long Island Rail Road are painted from above. In the past, MP 54 railcars were used, the design of which corresponded to the contemporary PRR passenger coaches or overhead line railcars.

On the non-electrified lines will EMD -Diesellokomotiven the rows DM30AC and DE30AC employed, the DM-locomotives for the busbar operation equipped electro-diesel locomotive and are able to transport the trains to Penn Station in Manhattan Iceland. They replaced locomotives of the Alco FPA-2 , FPA-4 and other Alco designs. Today, Bombardier double-decker cars are mainly used in these services . Single-story passenger coaches are no longer available.

future

In 2002 a proposal was made to merge the MTA subsidiaries Metro-North Railroad and LIRR to form MTA Rail Road . The merger efforts have so far not been pursued further.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ MTA Long Island Rail Road at a Glance. Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2018, accessed February 24, 2019 : “Annual ridership 89,400,000; Average weekday ridership 311,100 (...) Statistical data based on final estimates for the year ending Dec. 31, 2017 "
  2. ^ Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
  3. Christopher T. Baer: 1834. In: General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, its predecessors and successors and its historical context. June 2015, accessed February 26, 2019 .
  4. Christopher T. Baer: 1836. In: General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, its predecessors and successors and its historical context. June 2015, accessed February 26, 2019 .
  5. Christopher T. Baer: 1844. In: General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, its predecessors and successors and its historical context. June 2015, accessed February 26, 2019 .
  6. ^ A b Robert W. Andersen: Early History of the LIRR. November 11, 2007, accessed on February 26, 2019 (with scans of the founding statutes).
  7. a b c d e The Historical Guide to North American Railroads . Kalmbach Media, 2014, ISBN 978-0-89024-970-3 , pp. 174 (English).
  8. Christopher T. Baer: 1848. In: General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, its predecessors and successors and its historical context. June 2015, accessed February 26, 2019 .
  9. Christopher T. Baer: 1876. In: General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, its predecessors and successors and its historical context. April 2006, accessed February 26, 2019 .
  10. PENNSYLVANIA OPENS ITS GREAT STATION; First Regular Train Sent Through the Hudson River Tunnel at Midnight. In: The New York Times . November 27, 1910, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed March 3, 2020]).
  11. Stefan Vockrodt: From New York to the north and east . In: Railway history special. Railways in New York . No. 1 , 2013, p. 8th ff .
  12. ^ Michael N. Danielson, Jameson W. Doig: New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development . University of California Press, 1982, ISBN 978-0-520-90689-1 , pp. 216 .
  13. ^ Emanuel Perlmutter: State in Accord with the Pennsy on Buying LIRR; PRR Agrees on Price of $ 65 Million With New Transportation Agency . In: The New York Times . June 3, 1965 ( nytimes.com ).
  14. ^ Douglas E. Kneeland: State Takes Over the LI Rail Road; Finishes Paying the Pennsy - Re-elects All Officers . In: The New York Times . January 21, 1966 ( nytimes.com ).
  15. ^ A b Carol Steinberg: Bygone Era's Revival: Hauling Goods by Rail . In: The New York Times . January 31, 1999 ( nytimes.com ).
  16. ^ Alfonso A. Castillo: LIRR, freight rail company to continue pact for another decade . In: Newsday . October 29, 2017 ( newsday.com ).
  17. ^ New York & Atlantic Railway Company. Railroads of New York (RONY), 2018, accessed March 10, 2019 .
  18. "MTA Announces Historic Restructuring" MTA press release of October 9, 2002

Web links

Commons : Long Island Rail Road  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files