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lirr42 wrote:But its events like these that highlight just how vulnerable the LIRR is in single-track territories.Sayville isn't even single track. Although the lack of a crossover between Sayville and Babylon and the unidirectional signaling system can be very cumbersome.
Amtrak7 wrote:Are these the only noninterlocked switches between mainline tracks in signaled territory? (excluding sidings, yards, etc.)I think so, there are two more on the Lower Montauk, but that's in MBS territory.
lirr42, for the [url=http://thelirrtoday.blogspot.com/]The LIRR Today[/url] wrote:Mending the Montauk Branch Delay Mess, Part 2Read the full post here: Mending the Montauk Branch Delay Mess, Part 2
These days, in our look into the Montauk Branch delay mess, most of our focus falls on the hideous delays that tend to build up on Sundays. In the past couple months the LIRR has had quite a few Sundays they would probably like to forget. There is usually one or two things that go wrong and then the entire day is ruined.
Compounding delays is just one of the hazards of single-tracked territory. And, unfortunately, there's very little that the LIRR can do about it. Double tracking from Sayville to Montauk will never, ever, ever, ever happen. It's way to far for way to few people.
So if there's no real way to stop delays from compounding once they get rolling there's only two things the LIRR can do:The second one of those two is a tricky bit. For the most part, the only way to stop delays once they get going is to have a buffer built into the schedule. This concept, called "schedule padding" is a double edged sword...
- Stop the original delay from happening in the first place.
- Build in measures to lessen delays once they get started.
...[But] it looks like schedule padding isn't going to fix our problems. So that leaves us with option 1: stop the original delay from happening in the first place.
"No kidding. Sherlock, but how do we do that?" you might say. Unfortunately, there is no real way to figure that out. It's really a matter of luck. Hopefully, the scheduling gurus will keep tinkering with the schedules until we can finally get to the point where no train is extraordinarily delayed.
Take the Friday afternoon migration of thousands of Long Islanders and city dwellers to the Hamptons. If I had this blog this time last year, chances are I would be talking about how atrocious the Friday afternoon delays were. In previous years the Friday evening trains were often the most egregiously delayed.But, for the most part, this year the Friday trains have been very, very well behaved. Their improvement over last year is nothing short of phenomenal.
"Okay, you got me going, how did they do it?" Well, they accomplished option: they stopped the original delay from happening in the first place.In years past, the culprit--that first delay that got the ball rolling--was frequently one train in particular. The Cannonball. More often than not, the Cannonball would be so delayed that it would ruin the hope of any other train possibly arriving anywhere close to "on time" for the rest of the night.
You see, the pre-2013 Cannonball was always scheduled to arrive Jamaica at 4:22pm and leave at 4:25pm. That means they left three minutes--only three bloody minutes-- at Jamaica to get hundreds and hundreds of people off of Penn and Brooklyn connections and cram them into 12 C3's. I can bet that it was darn near impossible to get all those people off the connections, across the platforms, onto the C3's, seated, and all passengers and overflow thereof firmly inserted into the car's vestibule within 180 quick seconds.
And there it was. They weren't 20 minutes into the journey and the train was already ten minutes down...and then it only gets worse form there. Those 10 minutes eventually compounded into 20 minutes, then 40, then 80, then 160, and then the rest of the evening's down the toilet.
But all that has pretty much gone away. I must say, I was a bit skeptical at first when the news came out in April that the Cannonball's western terminus would be moved to Penn Station and the Jamaica stop would be dropped. But, as it turns out, the move was nothing short of brilliant. Without having that pesky Jamaica stop delaying things, the train can now get all the way to the Hamptons without suffering any serious initial terminal delay.
All in all, it looks like the changes made to the Cannonball plus some well placed schedule padding have all but cured the Friday evening delay mess. Now it's not perfect, by any stretch. Perfection is not to be expected of a single-tracked MBS rail line with all that many people. But the delays are nothing like last year's. They're reasonable--10-20 minutes.At this point in the year, the worst delay to the Cannonball has been only 20 minutes (and that was on the very first day). That's right, 20 minutes was the longest time the Cannonball was delayed so far this year. And the train has even arrived "on time" twice! The average delay to the Cannonball from Memorail day weekend through two weeks ago was only 9.8 minutes. That's pretty impressive for a train that would frequently score ten times that amount of delay minutes this time last year.
And that outstanding OTP performance has made all of the trains that follow the Cannonball perform much better as well.
So it looks like the Friday evening rush has been "cured" (or as good as it is going to get). But how do we now fix the Sunday mess? Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint one specific troublemaker. Over the next week I will take a more through look through the OTP records for the Sunday Montauk trains and I will report back soon...
For more information on this topic, see Mending the Montauk Branch Delay Mess Part 1.
