Poor LIRR Performance

Being a responsible railfan, I do my best to understand the how and why of a lot of what happens on the LIRR instead of just condemning the whole operation like the general public often does. However I heard an episode on channel-2 this morning that really had me shaking my head.

A westbound was making its station stop at Westbury operating on track-1 as it normally would. The conductor called 204 to explain that they were taking a delay because annoucements had apparently been made (they confimed it with the ticket office clerk) that the train would be on track-2 today, and all the people had gone down the stairs thru the underpass and back up the stairs to the other platform as per the announcement.

And now they were having to go back down the stairs again, thru the underpass again, and back up to the track-1 platform where they had been originally. And this was causing a documentable delay, and unreasonable inconvenience to the passengers trying to board the train.

I always try to give the LIRR the benefit of the doubt; as we know running a big railroad is a complicated job. But really, this kind of fiasco seems unreasonable and unwarranted. It seems like the LIRR's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. The railroad should be able to maintain better communications than was done here. And the paying customers deserve better service than this. What's more, this is the second such similar incident that I've heard at stations in that area in the last couple of weeks. Given this kind of poor performance, you can understand why the commuters get to hate the LIRR.

It's not just the LIRR, but the industry as a whole and I suspect it reflects upon society in general.
Case in point: Pacific Southwest Railroad Museum is shipping an RS32 to it's museum in Campo, Ca. The locomotive is inspected by U.P prior to shipment. The locomotive is picked up by the UP and transported to Rosevile, then transported to the LA basin. At that point, the locomotive was sent over the hump, then three MofW cars were kicked into it breaking the coupler. Of course UP made the museum purchase another coupler, becuz it wasn't UPs fault. This was May 13th. The locomotive was placed in a "secure" area, only to be vandalized. The locomotive was released last Friday for shippment and put onto a train. Unfortunatly, the train was bound for Kansas City, not El Centro, Ca wich is only about 150miles away.
Anyway, it seams that the air leak gnomes are at it again and the locomotive was pulled off the KC train and put back on the b/o list, and none of my brother UP machinists can figure out how to fix it. Well, today it's still on the b/o list with no ETD. UP shows it as an SD-40, damaged the locomotive, allowed the locomotive to be vandalized, almost miss routed it by a thousand miles and is still billing PSRM $3000 for the move that is soon to enter it's fourth month. Not bad, tFour months to move less than five hundred miles.
Its a wonder we ever made it west of the Susquehanna River.
As a UP employee, I hang my head in shame.

Head,

You observation is not unusual and is a frequent complaint from those who are not associated with an industry where things change and change again from minute to minute.

The Long Island goes through great pains to provide timely and accurate information. In the Movement Bureau they have created a position whose only job is to pay attention to what is going on and determine how it will impact passengers. He then sees that proper announcements are made.

It's unfortunate that sometimes the announcements of a track change go out and plans are changed -- a track opens, a stalled train clears, track work is picked up by the foreman. Where five or six people are involved a delay of just twenty seconds can cause the wrong information to go out. Remember that a dozen similar events can be happening at the same time -- and this can add to the difficulty in handling timely information.

While you and the media call attention to these two errors, others see the hundreds of times daily that the proper information is announced and the 270,000 passengers find their way with no inconvienence.

If you sit in a seat and do a similar job you'll find it easy to understand how such simple tasks can get messed up on occassion. And yea, sometimes it's embarassing.

Working for the Railroad can be embarassing.

In fact, I haven't even told my wife I work here.

Clem

Thanks Clem; I was actually hoping we'd hear from you on this topic. Chuckle! Actually I can relate to a lot of what you said. My job too often has several things happening at once, and status of events changing from minute to minute resulting in chaos. Twenty seconds or even less can have serious consequences for me and my "customers" too. I still think those angry people at Westbury deserved better service, but I often think the same thing when my efforts get screwed up at work too. It doesn't take much for things to go sideways in any big operation.

Clemuel wrote:

Working for the Railroad can be embarassing.

In fact, I haven't even told my wife I work here.

Clem

How do you hide a job like this from your wife? That's quite a skill man lol. Where does she think you work (or go to school?)?

"where water's thicker than blood!"

She thinks I'm some kind of spy, I suppose. In the witness protection program.

Clem

Has the performance on LIRR service on the Wesbury neighbourhood chenged for the better lately? I hope that was just an isolated incident.

I only heard of those two incidents I mentioned. I assume they were reasonably isolated occurrences. I'd not heard of this happening before, though it may have. As Clem pointed out, mostly the announcements are made correctly. I didn't mean to imply that those kind of mistakes were common; they're not.

yeah, I lived in Westbury for almost 25 years taking the train out of there quite often, and never had any troubles like that. Must be isolated.