Late January Storm 2015 Shutdown...

Make sure you tell your doctor you don't think he's essential next time you are ill or injured and need treatment. Like I said, cops, firefighters, and railroad workers don't have any special superpowers that us mere mortals don't have. Don't let your superiority complex confuse reality.

Last night demonstrated that people can go without the LIRR for a few hours during the middle of a blizzard and survive. I heard zero reports of a [sane] person wanting to go out and travel in the middle of a blizzard and were upset because they were unable to do so. Most people were at home, where they were instructed to be.

Aren't you a Dentist?

"Instructed to be". Those 3 words sum it up.

In this country, at least, there are limits on people's freedoms. You're free to the point where your actions do not jeopardize the rights or the well being of another person, and one of the government's primary responsibilities is to lookout for the well being of its citizens. For that reason, we have laws put in place to ensure that does not happen. You are not free to kidnap someone, and you are not free to run somebody over with your car. You are also not free to selectively pick and choose which laws or orders from the government you wish to comply with. You may not agree with Cuomo's decision here, but he was the one that the state's population elected to that position, so his views and his discretion is the one that the majority of the people in this state agree with, so he's in charge.

No, that is not a primary responsibility of government. I'll allow the Tool to tear this apart.

Like I said to Mr. ThirdRail before, I'm not sure how much pride you would have left over if you ran a signal because visibility was so poor during a blizzard, or your train got stranded in the middle of a forest someplace and one or more passengers fell severely ill or died due to the conditions. Something like that hasn't happened yet--and the railroads have been very lucky during severe weather--but that's no reason to tempt fate.

I take it you relate from personal experience, right? Stick to posting inaccurate track maps and info on your buff website.

Not to get involved in what is slipping into a political chat, but...

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Seems to cover it....

Gentlemen can you try to keep this thread on topic and tone down the nasty comments. It generates complaints and then I'll have to lock the thread.

Admin note:

Liquidcamphor wrote:Gentlemen can you try to keep this thread on topic and tone down the nasty comments. It generates complaints and then I'll have to lock the thread.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Listen to your Moderator, please.

Thank you.

Last I heard we might be expecting another eight inches overnight. Another shutdown?

Is it just me or did this place drop the ball with this storm?

This snow, Monday, February 2, was a nasty, twisty stinker. The roads were a mess by 4AM -- on top of the frozen solid remnants of the 2 snows that had just occurred. Then it turned to freezing rain for a couple of hours --- it was raining and it was 25 degrees! Then it turned back to snow. (We got five more inches just from the "back-end" alone!) I know someone who drove from Mineola to Deer Park Monday afternoon -- it took two and a half HOURS! (And that is not counting the 45 minutes it took them to chop the ice off their car!)

In spite of all of that, the commuters expect the LIRR to run as if it was 75 and sunny.

Slippy wrote:Is it just me or did this place drop the ball with this storm?

Considering you could literally count the number of PM Peak trains that arrived on-time on one hand, I would say so.

onorclose7 wrote:In spite of all of that, the commuters expect the LIRR to run as if it was 75 and sunny.

And why shouldn't they? They are paying the same fare as they are on a day when it is 75 and sunny. Incidents themselves have very little to do with how many trains arrive late, it's the LIRR handling of the incident that does so. And it's not exclusively the cancellations and delays that effect the passenger's perception of the incident, the LIRR's communication plays a big role in that too (i.e. if they had announced that they were going to do the modified schedule 1 cancellations (which they essentially did last night) around like noon, it would give people a lot more time to adjust their commute home (i.e. leave earlier or later, go out of Brooklyn or HPA) than it would if the LIRR made them show up to New York Penn just to see their train disappear off the board.)

Both their overall handling of the weather and their communication seemed fairly substandard yesterday.

LIRR42 - I am going to disagree with the beginning part of your post in regards to the paying customer expecting the railroad to operate as if it were a perfect sunny day. Someone with your intellect should know that exercising a little common sense to the variables is needed in a situation like this. You hear it all the time when you check the traffic and weather report the day before a storm, "allow yourself more time for the commute to/from work." It's no different whether you drive, take the train, bus, subway, or air travel. I do agree that at the very least communication should be as good as a bright and sunny day, but running an on-time operation with train travel is less feasible.

Something tells me the meteorologists at the NWS had stage fright predicting this one after what happened last week. Either that or they forgot to update their predictions because they were too busy engulfed in the Super Bowl.

It would be unreasonable for them to expect 100.0% of peak trains to operate on-time (unfortunately, commuters can't even expect that when it's 75 and sunny), but they should at least be able to expect more than 3.8% of them to be on-time.

And even of the five and only five trains that arrived on-time last night, one was only on-time because it was released from Jamaica without its connection (so really, the large majority of the passengers on that train actually got home late), and another train's final OTP was fairly 'suspicious'. So you could effectively say that only three PM peak trains arrived on-time. I would bet a good sum of money that that's the LIRR's worst on-time performance for a single rush hour in years.

Well lirr42 if you know so much as you do I suggest you go work in JCC or PSCC and see how easy it is to run trains "on time". You might come to see that just because your notes say one thing doesn't mean it can be an easy, seemingly logical answer.

SwingMan wrote:Well lirr42 if you know so much as you do I suggest you go work in JCC or PSCC and see how easy it is to run trains "on time". You might come to see that just because your notes say one thing doesn't mean it can be an easy, seemingly logical answer.

I don't have to know how hard or difficult or impossible it is to operate trains on-time, because I pay the LIRR a sum of money each month to do that for me. If they have to adjust running times of trains so they run on time, nobody is stopping them. You don't go to your doctor and pay him money for him to sit there and say, "go figure it out yourself." Other railroads around the country and around the world can manage to run trains relatively on-time for much of the time, even in bad weather, so it must be possible. We're talking about treating a sinus infection here, not curing cancer.

Well... 73 replies and 3089 views... Zzzzzz with no end in sight, it seems...