Belmont Park & the Belmont Stakes

It's the week of the Belmont Stakes!  The running of the 2013 Belmont Stakes, the third leg of the Trippe Crown and one of the biggest horse races in the country, will take place on Saturday June 8, 2013.  The Belmont Stakes draws nearly 100,000 people to the racetrack in Elmont, NY and the LIRR does the honors of bringing many of them there and back for the race.

The LIRR, in partnership with the New York Racing Association, provides train service to Belmont Park Wednesdays through Sundays for each of the racetrack's events.  On most normal days, the LIRR runs two round trips to Belmont Park, one train that arrives at the park around 11:30am and one that arrives around 12:30pm.  Then there are return trains that leave around either 3:45pm or 4:45 pm (depending on which day of the week it is) and one train that leaves around 6:00pm or 6:30pm.  On a normal day roughly 100 people take the train here for the races.  (you can see the normal race day schedule here)

However, on the Belmont Stakes day, the LIRR pulls out all the stops and runs 18 trains from New York to Belmont.  That's 16 more than a regular day!  And coming home there's even more, with a train leaving every 15 minutes from 6:27pm until roughly 9:00pm (in addition to four trains that leave slightly earlier).  The LIRR draws far more than 100 people to the trains on Belmont Stakes day, as you could probably tell by the 800% increase in trains to the park on that one day.  (you can see the Belmont Stakes day schedule here)

This week's posts will focus on Belmont Park, the station, tracks, services, operations and everything else about it.  Today we'll take a look at the station, tomorrow I'll unravel the tracks leading up to, into, and out of the station and how they tie in with QUEENS interlocking, Wednesday we'll have our regularly scheduled Interlocking Walkthrough of HALL interlocking (what have I gotten myself into!), Thursday's post will delve into how the LIRR pulls off the 800% increase in service for this one day only, and Friday we'll have some fun as I explain how I think the LIRR should be using Belmont Park station better.

So it's going to be a fun week of posts, so stay tuned!  Today we begin with Belmont Park the station.  Before we go too much further, Belmont Park has a rocky bit of history behind it.  Wikipedia does an excellent job of concisely explaining Belmont Park station's history, so I'm just going to copy and paste that (hey, it is public domain!)

"When Belmont Park opened on May 4, 1905, about 19,000 passengers—nearly half of all attendees—took the railroad to the racetrack on opening day.  The first electric trains to Belmont Park ran on October 2, 1905, the opening day of the fall meet.  The original station was located south of Hempstead Turnpike; the present terminal north of Hempstead Turnpike was opened in 1957.

"When the spring 2009 meet began on April 29, 2009, the MTA halted daily service to Belmont Park station due to insufficient funding in the MTA's budget.  The New York Racing Association provided shuttle bus service from the Queens Village station to Belmont Park; the N6, Q2 and Q110 also offered alternate service.  On May 28, 2009, Belmont Park service resumed per the MTA board's approval as the New York State legislature passed a funding plan for the MTA.  This was the only service reduction enacted as part of the MTA's 2009 "doomsday" budget.

"However, regular service to Belmont Park was suspended again in 2010 due to MTA budget cuts and trains only operated on June 4 and 5 during the weekend of the Belmont Stakes. On other racing days, the New York Racing Association provided shuttle bus service between the racetrack and the Queens Village station. On April 26, 2011 the NYRA announced that it would subsidize the cost of providing LIRR service to the racetrack for the entire spring/summer meet, thus securing daily train service to Belmont Park."

Today, the Belmont Park station stands as one of the last vestiges of the low-level platform era of the LIRR.  At one point in LIRR history, almost every last one of its platforms were "low-level" platforms.  Low-level platforms, as supposed to high-level platforms which dominate the LIRR today, are primarily composed of a couple inches of concrete or asphalt on the ground level, and to board trains from the low-platform, you would have to walk up steps, that are usually on the train.  Here's a photo of the Maplewood NJTransit station, a station that is a low-level platform.  You can see the commuters are much closer to the tracks, and to board the trains, the passengers have to walk up stairs (like these on a NJT Comet V car) that are on the train to get onboard.

The LIRR is a system that is primarily dominated by high-level platform stations.  High-level platforms put you up much closer to the train, so that when the train comes there are no steps to climb, you're right on level with the door and you just walk in (watching the gap, of course).  I'm not going to belittle the whole high-platform vs. low-platform thing, I'll provide more details between the two and which one is better in another post at another time.

But, the point I am trying to make here is that all of the LIRR's stations are high-level platforms.  Except one.  That one exception is Belmont Park.

Belmont Park is the LIRR's only low-level platform station.  In the entire system.  The only one.  It is also the only station in the whole world to be a low-platform station with third rail.  All of Metro-North's and SEPTA's stations in third-rail territory are high-platform stations, so this is the lone exception to that rule as well.

People who board trains at Belmont Park don't necessarily climb up stairs that are built into the train (the LIRR's trains don't have steps built in like the NJT ones in the photo linked above do).  When you board a train at Belmont Park you first walk up a set of wooden steps that are positioned in front of each door opening.

Here's a photo of Belmont Park station, taken from the overpass.  In this photo, you can see the low-level platforms, how different they look from all of the other LIRR platforms, and the wooden steps that are positioned to line up with the doors of the train:

In traditional LIRR fashion you can notice not one, not two, but FOUR LIRR employees standing around doing nothing in the lower left-hand corner of the photo.  (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

This could very well be the only low-level station in the entire world that is set up this way.  Most other low-level stations around the country and around the world have trains that stop at them have either steps built-into the trains (like the train cars that NJTransit, Metro-North, SEPTA, and the MBTA have, among others) or they have trains that have the door very close to the ground, like the low-platform only Superliners that Amtrak uses on its west-coast routes.

The LIRR however, does not have any trains at all that have steps built into them.  So, some smart, non-upper-management person came up with the idea to mount permanent steps on the platform so train can continue to use the station.

Why doesn't the LIRR just build high-level platforms here and be done with it?  Well, high-level platforms are expensive (really expensive), and with the relatively low ridership that the station sees, it just isn't worth it to pour all that money in for two trains a day.  And unlike the other low-platform stations that the LIRR didn't want to bother with converting to high-level platforms (i.e. Mill Neck, Quogue, all but one of the Lower Montauk stations), they couldn't just close the station and call it a day.  It falls into that awkward middle area.  It's not used enough to warrant the upgrades to high-level platforms, and it's too useful to the LIRR to close.  So we have wooden steps, a happy medium.

The Belmont Park station is composed of four low-level island platforms, each with a track to both sides for a grand total of eight tracks.  The outermost two tracks, tracks 8 and 1, do not have the wooden platform steps, however, therefore, they cannot board any LIRR trains from those tracks. Tacks 6 though 2, however, do have wooden steps.

All of the tracks are connected by staircases and non-working escalators to an overhead mezzanine, which is connected to the grandstand at the park itself.

A look at the Belmont Park LIRR station through the fence at the south end of the tracks.

The Belmont Park Station also sees more than just passenger trains here.  New York & Atlantic Railway serves the park twice a week by delivering cars of feed for the horses.

The Belmont Park train station is also one of the few areas of the park that is locaed in Queens County.  Most other things, including the stadium, are in Nassau County, so coming from the train to the stadium you have to cross over the county border.

Despite the station being in Queens, it is not in fare zone 3 and CityTicket is not good to this station.  Belmont Park falls into its little own special fare zone.  Belmont Park station does not fall into zones 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, or 14.  It doesn't really have a fare zone.

The LIRR sells tickets to the stadium under one of its special package deals.  Belmont Park has its own special fares, and it is not listed with all the other stations on the Ticket Vending Machines..  If you want to purchase a ticket to Belmont Park you have to tap the "Deals and Getaways" button the home-screen and purchase a ticket that way.  The fares are listed in the first panel of this Belmont Stakes day schedule.  They're pretty steep from New York, Brooklyn, or Jamaica, but if you're coming from a station out east and going via Jamaica, the round-trip fares are not all that bad.

Here's one more oddity about Belmont Park station.  No monthly or weekly commutation tickets are valid here.  The only tickets accepted are those special Belmont Park tickets.  So my monthly ticket that is good from zone 1 to 14 (I live in Montuak and commute to LIC) is good at every single station on the whole railroad.  Except this one.  If I want to go to Belmont Park on Saturday, or any day (and I do), I have to purchase an $11 round-trip ticket from Jamaica to Belmont Park.

Now why they have it set up this way is beyond me.  Why can't they just make it a zone 3 station (it does fall in Queens), charge zone 3 fares, and accept commutation tickets.  What better way to stifle ridership then telling people who already pay $200-$300 a month for a monthly that they have to purchase another $11 ticket because their monthly isn't accepted on that train.  Sounds like another idea for the next installment of "Tales of LIRR Ineptitude" (which I'm thinking of turning into a recurring series, by the way).

For more photos of the Belmont Park Station, check out these photos on SubChat and NYC Transit Forums.

Tomorrow's post will detail more information about the tracks that go into the Belmont Park station, and how they connect in with the Mainline just north of this location.  Stay tuned!