As we get closer and closer to "zero hour," or 12:01am Sunday, July 20, 2014, the point at which members of eight different LIRR unions currently going through some rocky contract negotiations can legally strike, the prospects of somehow getting through this dispute with out some sort of self-help action grow dimmer and dimmer. As the unions proceed with strike plans for July 20th, some have wondered if the LIRR will begin to dial back service in advance of the strike.
When the clock strikes 12:01 am on Sunday morning, crews currently working trains can continue their current runs and/or finish their current shift, at which point they would leave the property and would not be allowed back in until the work stoppage is over. As the schedule stands now, there will be twenty-three different LIRR trains and just a hair over 3,000 riders in motion all across Long Island (from F interlocking at the mouth of the East River Tunnels all the way to Amagansett). The railroad can go full steam ahead into Saturday night and just leave things where they end up, but it seems more likely that they will begin to scale back service in advance of a strike so that they can put the equipment in certain, planned places so that it would be able to remain safe during a strike and be quickly retrieved when service is restored.
In yesterday's press conference, embedded in this post, the MTA made it sound like they would indeed be scaling back service before "zero hour" so that everything can get to its proper place before the striking unions walk off the job.
Neither the MTA nor the LIRR have made it clear when they plan on stepping service down, or to what extent they plan on doing so. In an announcement Monday, union coalition leader Anthony Simon mentioned that "winding down of service will begin well before [12:01am on July 20th], perhaps as early as Wednesday." However, following the MTA's press conference on Monday afternoon, it is sounding like that any reduction in service is not likely to start happening until we get closer to the weekend, most likely Saturday.
Over the course of the day Saturday seems like the more likely option, considering that even when the hurricanes came, the MTA only needed a day or so of advanced warning to stash everything away, and this time they don't have to do things like remove crossing gates, shrink-wrap TVM's, inflate giant, water-filled dams at the mouth of West Side Yard. They'll likely start to shift everything into their desired locations over the course of Saturday and service would conclude sometime Saturday evening. But for the moment, I wouldn't be too worried about this particular workweek.
The biggest variable here will be what the LIRR does with the Summer Hamptons trains, or if people will try and sneak off to the east end to recoup at least a portion of this summer weekend. The current Summer Hamptons equipment rotations will leave four sets of diesel equipment in Montauk Yard at "zero hour" (the equipment from trains 2708f, 2712f, 2718f, and 8712a) so perhaps the LIRR will annul some of the Friday runs, run some of the Sunday extras on Saturday, or sneak the equipment back to Speonk or Jamaica under the cover of darkness Saturday morning.
Anything could happen at this point, and it's a bit early to tell what exactly they will do, but I will most certainly come back and update you if the MTA releases any further plans.
Update 7/16/14 6:00pm: I asked the MTA what, if anything, they had planned to dial back service in advance of a strike, and they said that their first priority is still resolving this at the negotiating table, yadda, yadda, yada, but in the interest of safety and so that no one is stranded in the event of a strike, their goal would be to ensure that no trains would be moving at "zero hour", or 12:01am Sunday morning. To ensure that can happen, the MTA expects to publish a list of “last trains” to originate on each branch. Cancellations would begin around 9:00pm Saturday evening, with longer-distance trains being the first ones to be canceled.
I presume a good sized chunk of the Friday Hamptons passengers may be heading out to time shares of more than a week end stay so there will certainly be some demand from the service. If you kill some of the service the regular commuters will suffer. As the negotiations may go into the weekend with extensions possible I think the LIRR will run regular service. If the walk happens at 12:01AM the equipment will probably stay tucked away in the Montauk yard. Here is a bit of a wild card. No one knows how long a strike will be and it is Hurricane season. I would not leave anything of any value in Long Beach. How did the Montuak and West Side yards hold up during Sandy?
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to "as early as Wednesday" that the unions announced? Is Simon just clueless or was announcing a super-early date just a bad attempt to get people riled up? What a sham.
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