Boland's Landing

Boland's Landing, as seen in yesterday's interlocking walkthrough of DUNTON interlocking, is one of the LIRR's two employee-only stops.  It is the lesser-known, lesser-served, and lesser-used station of the two, with it's partner on the east side of Jamiaca, Hillside, seeing more people and more trains.

Boland's Landing, looking east

Boland's Landing is a pretty odd station in a couple of ways.  First of all, it is only served by trains on weekdays.  It's in bigger and bigger company nowadays, as the West Hempstead Branch and Ronkonkoma-Greenport portion of the Mainline also do not see any trains on weekends (along with Hunterspoint Avenue and Long Island City), but for a while it was only one of three stations that were only open five days a week.

Secondly, it is one of only two stations in the system that has a wooden platform.  Boland's Landing, along with Hollis station, doesn't have the traditional concrete slab platforms.  Traffic at the station isn't that large, and the vast majority of the people using the station are LIRR employees who know how to walk properly, so the wooden platform isn't really a problem.

Thirdly, half of this station sits within an interlocking's limits.  Stations themselves sitting physically within interlockings are a pretty rare thing.  Usually, interlockings end just before the station platform starts, but the westbound platform at this station actually falls within DUNTON interlocking.  There are very few other stations on the LIRR that share this trait.

Fourth, Boland's Landing is the one and only flag stop on the LIRR.  Because of the so few trains that are actually scheduled to stop at  Boland's Landing, its a general rule of thumb that if an engineer sees somebody on the platform waiting for a train, they'll usually stop at the platform and pick up the person.  Every other station in the system doesn't share this trait.  Hillside sees far more trains on a daily basis, so this impromptu stopping system isn't necessary over there, and flag stopping trains at real passenger stations is a big no-no.

Fifth, Boland's Landing station is not in the M7's ASI system.  While it appears on the digital destination signs when a train is scheduled to stop there, the station is not officially recognized by the GPS system the M7's use to keep track of what station they are at.  So usually after a stop at Boland's Landing, the "Boland's-Employees" name on the destination signs will linger for a couple minutes after the train has left the station until finally the M7's ASI system catches on and changes the sign to the next station.

While not an oddity, Boland's Landing's station platforms are two cars long,.  But usualy only the first door of the first car is keyed open, since that's all that's really nescescary.

The LIRR does make the schedule for Boland's Landing public online, but you do have to do a bit of digging to find it.  The schedule that is current at the time of this post is reprinted at the right.  Note: if you're not an LIRR employee, you can't get off at this stop, but if you wanted to ride one of those trains that does stop at Boland's to get a closer look at the station, you can certainly do that.



So why does Boland's Landing even exist? Well, the station is situated right next to the Morris Park Facility, which is the LIRR's main diesel repair facility, and Boland's Landing station allows LIRR workers who work there the opportunity to take the train to work.  What exactly goes on at the Morris Park Facility will be delved into at a later point in a separate post.