Thiele Slams LIRR Decision To Not Provide Commuter Connection Trains On Summer Fridays

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. on Monday announced that the Long Island Rail Road had rejected the request of South Fork officials to provide at least one eastbound commuter train between Speonk and Montauk on Friday mornings in the summer.

The request was made early last month in an effort to continue partial South Fork Commuter Connection services on summer Fridays. Most of the year, the popular service provides two eastbound commuter trains in the morning and two westbound trains in the afternoon Monday through Friday. East Hampton and Southampton towns provide shuttle service to and from major employment centers as part of the service for daily commuters.

But in the summertime, when seasonal transportation demand increases, the LIRR says it cannot spare the equipment needed to run the eastbound service.

One westbound train, which is part of the line’s regularly scheduled service, does run early Friday afternoons. The LIRR’s popular eastbound express train, the Cannonball, which runs on Friday evenings in the summer, is given priority on the lone track serving the East End, requiring the suspension of the later of the two westbound Commuter Connection trains.

Thiele said he was disappointed in the decision. “All we asked for was one train,” he said in a release.

Thiele added, in stronger terms, that the decision not to provide the one train for the South Fork as an alternative to the “trade parade” was foolish and shortsighted.

“The LIRR is asleep at the switch,” he said. “The growth on Long Island is happening out east, especially since the pandemic. The SFCC was a first step to grow LIRR ridership to meet that growth and the increasing demand for service.”

He added that the Commuter Connection has been one of the most popular decisions the LIRR has made in recent years. By ignoring the request for continued service, “the LIRR has told these commuters to drop dead,” Thiele continued. “You can’t grow ridership if a commuter can only take the train four days out of five, especially when the fifth day is the busiest traffic day of the week.”

Thiele also criticized the railroad for failing to take promised steps to upgrade infrastructure by adding sidings on the South Fork so that more service could be provided and conflicts over track use like that caused by the Cannonball could be eliminated.

“The LIRR and MTA committed to funding South Fork sidings during the MTA’s lobbying efforts on congestion pricing,” he said. “They have done nothing. These infrastructure improvements are exactly the kind of transformative project that should now be funded with the $350 million in capital funding that was included in the 2022 state budget.”

He said if four or five sidings were built on the South Fork so that multiple trains could run simultaneously, coupled with the battery-operated electric cars the LIRR says it is investigating, it would be a game changer for the South Fork and other lines that are served by diesel trains.