This item appeared first in News and Notes: January 21, 2019
The LIRR’s current Yaphank station, situated near a cluster of Suffolk County offices near Yaphank Avenue has never been in all that great a position, there are very few people living nearby and it’s not all that convenient to access.
Town of Brookhaven officials have been asking for years to relocate the Yaphank station about a mile and a half further east, nearer to the William Floyd Parkway. The William Floyd Parkway site is closer to homes in East Yaphank, a number of large businesses south of the LIE, Brookhaven Technology Center (2,500 employees) a large new development north of the LIE, and Brookhaven National Laboratory (3,000 employees).
Governor Cuomo, in his 2017 State of the State tour, announced that $20 million would be provided in that year’s state budget to build a new station at Brookhaven National Lab, bringing town officials’ dreams closer to reality. The railroad did not take immediate action, naturally, but this train is finally easing out of the station after the MTA awarded a contract for a preliminary design and environmental review consultant in December 2018. The study, awarded to Gannet Fleming for $4,040,289, will identify/select a potential location for the new station and perform the 30% design. Railroad officials met with the town earlier this month to discuss the plans.
Constructing a new station along the William Floyd Parkway at a site where it will be easier to access by residents and workers alike is a no-brainer, and should have happened a long time ago. As I said back in 2017, I don’t see much benefit to closing the existing station…the new station will very likely need to be built from scratch anyways, as it’s not like they’re sawing the existing station off its foundation and move it to the new site. While the current Yaphank station is not in the most ideal location, it is very close to a large number of county offices, and could be a good destination stop if the railroad were to provide decent service there. In other words, instead of commuting by car to one of these offices, employees could take the train from other Ronkonkoma Branch stations instead. All that’s really being saved by closing the existing 1.5-car platform station is a small amount of operating costs, and that comes at the price of potential riders commuting to those county offices. The speed limit on this portion of the line is just 45 mi/hr, so the time penalty of making one additional stop is only a minute.
While relocating (or better yet, leaving the station where it is and building a whole new station at Upton/East Yaphank) will certainly help make it easier for people to access LIRR service in this area, it is not going to make riders magically appear out of thin air. Station location is just one part of the equation—you can have a train station right outside the front door, but if the service provided is awful, you’re still going to need to drive to get to work. Currently, service at the existing Yaphank station is limited to four eastbound trains and five westbound trains (the fifth of which is at 11:00p…not quite commuting hours). While the LIRR has re-timed weekday Greenport trains to make them more useful, and the completion of the Ronkoknoma Branch Double Track project now means Yaphank has reverse-peak service for the first time, there is still just one train in each direction during rush hours…too infrequent for most people to rely upon.
To make rail service in Yaphank useful—wherever the station may be—the LIRR needs to drastically improve East End rail service. Officials continue to call for expanding electrification to Yaphank or Riverhead, which would enable more service. Electrification isn’t needed to run a full- fledged rural rail system, especially now that new FRA passenger equipment safety standards would make acquiring leightweight DMU’s for the East End easier. There East End has a ton of potential for better rail usage, the LIRR just needs to put in the effort.
The current timeline for the project shows the completion of the environmental review targeted for December 2019, with a design-build procurement sometime in 2020...that means we are unlikely to see the station ready until sometime in 2021, at the earliest, or 2022. Five years is a long time for a small station in a relatively undeveloped area, but that seems to be the pace things go at these days. Progress, nonetheless.
