This post was published in 2014 and was a discussion on a series of concept timetables for East Side Access developed by The LIRR Today. The LIRR published a proposed service plan and draft timetables in 2022. Read about the proposed East Side Access service plan here.
This morning we will press on with our look at what a future set of LIRR timetables could look like with a glimpse of how the beleaguered West Hempstead Branch could work following East Side Access. This branch has had its service slowly chipped away over the last several decades. As LIRR service expanded, slots for little West Hempstead Branch trains were given away to bigger and busier trains from places like Huntington and Ronkonkoma. The mentality is that the poor ridership along the branch cannot justify the wasting of a rush-hour slot for a train in the cramped Penn Station.
Well, since conditions into and out of New York will likely be improving once East Side Access is opening up, the smaller branches, like the Long Beach, Far Rockaway, and West Hempstead Branches stand the most to gain since they will no longer be "shut out" of Penn Station because they are too small. The added capacity will allow for increased LIRR service to these stations, and as a result, hopefully passengers will begin to gravitate back towards these branches and things will even out a tad bit more.
Included in the linked .pdf file below is sample weekday and weekend (yes, weekend!) West Hempstead Branch timetables that include service to Grand Central Terminal. Peak, off-peak, reverse-peak, and special/event trains are all included.
The timetables only show revenue trains, not equipment or deadhead moves. I have planned out each deadhead move, equipment rotation, etc., as I was doing this project, and I have most of those moves handwritten down on paper, but I have yet to insert all of them into the actual excel timetables. Nonetheless, I tried whenever possible to minimize the amount of deadheading, since it is essentially wasted crew and equipment hours, but in some cases, it was unavoidable.
Just like the other timetable posts, here are some "Key Assumptions" and "Service Guidelines" which I built the timetables on:
Key Assumptions
- The current infrastructure on the branch will remain the same or similar to what it is now.
- During peak hours, train service is sustained at 30 minute intervals in the peak direction. Train service operates to all four main terminals during rush hours, as capacity allows.
- Passengers will no longer be required to transfer trains at Valley Stream, regardless of the time of day. Service will be provided through to a western terminal during all daytime hours.
- St. Albans will be served exclusively by trains to/from West Hempstead. With a few exceptions, Babylon Branch trains will no longer stop at St. Albans.
- During the off-peak hours, service is provided approximately every 90 minutes to and from Hunterspoint Avenue.
- During the weekday reverse-peak period, additional trains are run in the reverse-peak direction from Hunterspoint Avenue to provide service every hour during reverse-peak times (these trains turn off of other peak hour trains).
- On weekends, one additional round-trip is added in during the busiest travel periods to/from Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn. Additionally, select Babylon Branch trains to/from Freeport make stops at St. Albans.
Planning peak-hour service on the West Hempstead Branch was not my top priority when making the schedules, so these trains got the "scraps" of the slots that were left during the rush hours. That being said, riders on the branch still have two trains to each of the four electric terminals during rush hours. During the morning rush, the trains to New York are able to operate through at the middle of the peak, while in the evening, the trains to West Hempstead will leave in the beginning/end of the peak period. During the rest of the rush hour, trains operate to/from Atlantic Terminal or Hunterspoint Avenue.
Service is set up during the peak periods to run on a clockface schedule, with departures to/from branch stations every 30 minutes. All trains stop at Jamaica, increasing connection options there.
During the off-peak periods, trains will operate to/from Hunterspoint Avenue. Hunterspoint Avenue was chosen as the primary terminal for the West Hempstead Branch trains due to their running pattern. I wanted to keep some room in the tunnels to allow for flexibility in the event of needed trackwork or service disruptions, so I was not able to fit these trains in on their 90 minute headways without reducing that operating flexibility during trackwork/disruptions.
Additionally, I chose Hunterspoint Avenue over Atlantic Terminal as a terminal for these trains due to the fact that these trains will operate via the Montauk Branch between VALLEY and Jamaica. With the future reconfiguration of the Jamaica interlockings, it would be pretty clumsy to have trains coming from the Montauk Branch to go to Atlantic Terminal, and it would be much more fluid to send these trains to Hunterspoint Avenue instead. That being said, I still have managed to get some service through to Atlantic Terminal during rush hours and the busy travel periods on weekends.
West Hempstead Branch service to Hunterspoint Avenue, coupled with service from Port Jefferson and the Montauk Branch, will provide service (though somewhat inconsistent) to Hunterspoint Avenue all day long, even during the off-peak periods.
In creating the schedules, I tried my hardest to completely eradicate the transfer at Valley Stream. Currently, almost all West Hempstead Branch trains require you to transfer and it is a fairly clumsy move that does nothing but waste people's time. The last time I rode the branch, we had to wait some 10 minutes at Valley Stream for our connection to stroll in. I imagine such a transfer is despised by the riders along the branch, and it seems like most of them just give up with the West Hempstead Branch all-together and drive to Valley Stream to catch more frequent service there.
Ideally, increased service (that operates through to Jamaica and the western terminals) will draw riders back to the West Hempstead Branch instead of having them driving to Valley Stream and crowding onto those trains there.
You also will notice that West Hempstead Branch trains no longer stop at Valley Stream at all. Coming off the West Hempstead Branch, a train has to traverse all the way across VALLEY interlocking, blocking traffic on the Montauk Branch by doing so. By having trains come off the branch, stay on the Montauk Branch and not go near the platform at Valley Stream and going straight for St. Albans instead, trains no longer have to take a big, slow crossover move to get through Valley Stream.
Additionally, St. Albans is now served exclusively by West Hempstead Branch trains. Babylon Branch trains, with a few exceptions on the weekends, will no longer have to waste their time stopping there. Service will be increased from bi-hourly to every 90 minutes with this move, so service won't be cut, it's just that the stops will be taken off the much busier Babylon Branch trains and put on the shorter West Hempstead runs.
With a clockface schedule, there aren't too many complexities as to how trains are run, so there's not all that much more to talk about. If service ever does expand, and with the talk of transit-oriented development possibly coming in the future, expanding service up to 45-minute headways at some point should hopefully become attainable at some point, but I think this setup should suit the needs of West Hempstead Branch and St. Albans riders as they are now, as well as provide some room for additional ridership expansion along the branch.
I don't commute along the West Hempstead Branch or to St. Albans, so I am not sure if St. Albans sees any kind of intra-island travel. With the hospital so close by, I would imagine some riders would possibly want to take the train there, but I am not aware of what that market might be. If anyone uses St. Albans, or knows of someone who does, I'd like to hear any thoughts you might have about intra-island or intra-city travel at St. Albans. I would be open to trying to find a lightly-traveled Babylon or Long Beach Branch to stop there in the morning if they would be letting off a decent amount of passengers when they do so.
As always, you very welcome to leave comments, thoughts, suggestions, corrections, etc. You can leave a comment by accessing the comment form below (by signing in with a username or just leaving your name and e-mail), or e-mail me at patrick@thelirrtoday.com. Your feedback is appreciated.
View an index of all of the other sample timetables, the posts about those timetables, and revision history, right here.
In the mornings, St. Albans trains coming from West Hempstead are standing room only, all three stopping between 7 and 8am...the same goes for the afternoon, however all trains stopping at St. Albans in the afternoon are going somewhere along the Babylon Branch. St. Albans gets a lot more ridership than you know, just not in off-peak hours. It is also surprisingly used a lot starting with the 3:21 to the 6:46pm eastbound trains.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your input. I have expanded peak-hour service at St. Albans to include two additional Freeport trains stopping there during rush hours. You can see the extra trains included in the timetables.
ReplyDeleteWhy is off peak service on a 90 minute headway? From your schedule, trains take 50 minutes or slightly below one-way. With 10 minutes of recovery at each time, a train could complete a round trip in 120 minutes. At this cycle length, the two trains in your schedule could provide hourly service. The marginal cost of this service increase would be limited to just vehicle operations costs, as the train crews (presumably) get paid the same sitting around or operating trains, and no additional trains are required.
ReplyDeleteIf St. Albans is one of the least-used LIRR stops, wouldn't a better alternative be to send all trains down the Atlantic Branch, or at least close it down completely?
ReplyDeleteThe Atlantic Branch sees enough trains too, plus, to send trains down the Atlantic Branch, they have to do the clumsy crossover move at VALLEY I mentioned. The best routing for trains that come off the West Hempstead Branch is to send them up the Montauk Branch towards Holban and Jamaica.
ReplyDeleteSince they're going to be on that routing anyways, it doesn't do much harm to have them stop at St. Albans. It would be fine if those stop there, it's just not worth it to have the heavily loaded Babylon Branch trains waste their time stopping there.
At some point I will have to go through and reconcile all the train numbers. With a bunch of small changes being constantly made the discrepancies sneak up, so after I finish with the last of the changes, I will go through and fix up all the track numbers so there aren't any conflicts or discrepancies.
ReplyDeleteDeparture times for the evening Long Beach trains (and the reverse-peak morning ones) have been adjusted by up to four minutes to account for single-tracking over LEAD Drawbridge. The trains have to be adjusted slightly so they don't interfere with the peak-direction trains going over the drawbrige into Long Beach.
Westbound hold time at Jamaica is 5 minutes. If reduced by three minutes to a two minute hold time, then a 13 minute recovery could occur at both terminals, one minute above the stated twelve minute minimum recovery. Given that the two minutes as Jamaica effectively function as a mid-line recovery point, where slack is intentionally built into the timetable, there appears to be no limiting reason why hourly service with two trains could not be provided.
ReplyDeleteThe wait time at Jamaica is what it is due to the fact that if three trains (the WM train to HPA, as well as two connections to Grand Central and Penn Station), arrive at Jamaica at once, only two of those can proceed ahead at once, since there's only two mainline westbound tracks.
ReplyDeleteThe Hunterspoint Avenue trains usually get the short straw in these cases since they generally carry fewer passengers and they tend to clash with the other trains when they get to HAROLD (which is why they're typically wrong-railed and snuck into/out of HPA on the opposite track during rush hours today).
If I were to reduce the wait time at Jamaica, the westbound trains would have to run several minutes ahead of their connections and the eastbound trains would have to run several minutes behind their connections. This would lengthen the transfer time at Jamaica for passengers not going to HPA (by about 6-8 minutes), as well as reduce the amount of time available to turn the train at HPA.
When I was setting up the West Hempstead I looked into trying to get it to work on hourly headways, but it was difficult getting everything to mesh properly. I will take another look and see if I can get it in, but doing it without a third set someplace will be difficult.