Weekend Tunnel Closings - Unusual Routing

This weekend two of the four East River Tunnels are closed for work related to East Side Access/Harold Interlocking. I had a very interesting ride to and from Manhattan today.

Lines 1 & 3 appeared to be out-of-service. Westbounds were using Line-2, which was not surprising. What did surprise me was Eastbounds using Line-4! I know they're all signaled in both directions but I'd never seen that done before. My eastbound train crossed over from LIRR Track-3 to Track-1 at the east end of Harold and ran on Track-1 all the way to east of Kew Gardens where it crossed over to Track-2. Temporary platforms were used at Woodside across tracks 2 & 4 to service eastbound trains on Tk-1. I'd never seen that before either. Very interesting.

If only I could have been on an M-3 train (instead of an M-7) to see the full view of track and signals on this diverse track routing.......... Long live the M-1!

I couldn't figure out for the life of me, why didn't they use the low tracks in Penn for eastbounds and send them east out Line 2 and have the westbounds use the high side and Line 4 like usual. Harold was congested while westbound trains off Mainline 3 were routed to Line 2 while eastbounds sat at 37 bridge at a stop signal for the westbounds to cross over. This could have been smoother, but hey, it's not my railroad. This also made it impossible for any Amtraks to do a straight eastbound move out of Penn since they don't use the high side too often.

I wondered too about eastbounds and westbounds having to cross each other.
I must have been lucky. We had no delay in either direction. The average rider probably didn't even notice the difference.