Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard

One of the LIRR's major East Side Access Readiness projects, the railroad will construct a new Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard along the Mainline.  This new yard would house several electric trains and would allow for increased service along the Mainline during the rush hours.

One of the major problems with the Mainline today is the fact that Ronkonkoma Yard only has a limited amount of train storage space.  The current Ronkonkoma Yard east of the station has 12 tracks for trains, and the Certified North Siding west of the station allows the railroad to store another train set (the one they put here is usually used on train 2017, which originates in Central Islip.)  While the lack of capacity at Ronkonkoma Yard is noticeable, it is not necessarily severe.  To my knowledge, there is still at least one open track in the yard most mornings, so it could be possible to stash another train set there for another peak round-trip (they could also use the siding at Central Islip more, running a train out there trailing 2006 and having it wait on the siding for an opportune time, since after 6:30am, the siding in Central Islip isn't used at all until mid-morning most days).

Now, of course, the real root of this problem, as is the real root of any problem related to the Mainline or Port Jefferson Branches on the LIRR, is the lack of a third mainline track between QUEENS and DIVIDE.  If the LIRR had a third track here, they would have more opportunities to run reverse-peak trains out to Ronkonkoma, where they can turn and provide more westbound service.

I have mentioned that the way the LIRR clumsily gets around the limited Mainline capacity during rush hours now is by "throating" the mainline West of Hicksville.  While this is going on in the rush hour, both of the tracks are used in the peak direction.  This increases capacity along the most constrained portion of the line, but it does so only in the peak direction.  Throating the Mainline results in reverse-peak capacity, for either deadhead or revenue trains, being cut to zero.  When both tracks are being used in the westbound direction, it is impossible to get trains going back east to the terminals to make up service later in the rush hour.

This is a particularly painful problem at Huntington.  There, there is essentially no storage space for electric trains at all.  There is the North Side Track and the South Side Track, but the combined capacity of those de facto yards is minimal.  The only way Huntington can effectively function as a terminal is if there is a constant supply of reverse-peak service to the station, so the equipment can turn and make up more peak-direction trains.  During much of the rush hour, the peak to reverse-peak ratio at Huntington in the morning is essentially 1:1.  For every one reverse-peak train you can add one peak-direction train.  That's it. 

As mentioned above, this is also a problem at Ronkonkoma (tough to a lesser extent).  The throating prohibits eastbound trains from getting back to Ronkonkoma, so the yard empties quickly.

The Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard would allow for the LIRR to store more trains on the eastern end of the Mainline.  There will be a lesser need (equipment-wise) for reverse-peak service, since the yards will take longer to empty out.

This will essentially create an illusionary increase in capacity on the Mainline.  By having more trains stashed on the outer end of the Mainline, the LIRR will be able to "throat" the Mainline longer, thus providing some extra increase in peak capacity, but as a result of doing so, reverse-peak service will become even more limited.

Up until a little while ago, there was a lot of mystery as to where the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard was going to go.  The term "Mid-Suffolk" is not very precise geographically and it could refer to many different potential locations.  For a while, it was believed that the LIRR would be electrifying out to Yaphank and building a big yard there.  That would be able to feed more trains to Yaphank, Medford, Ronkonkoma, and stations west.

However, recent indicators coming out of the LIRR makes it sound more and more like the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard will be going in at Ronkonkoma and not Yaphank.

In the meeting notes for the January 2014 MTA Board LIRR Committee Meeting, the LIRR had the following to say about the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard:

"The new Electric Yard will be constructed adjacent and to the south of the existing Ronkonkoma Storage Yard on existing LIRR property. Project work includes design and construction of yard lead and train storage tracks, track and yard signal system, a welfare facility, lighting, and drainage. Design and construction of the new Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard is a critical piece of the LIRR's plans for operational flexibility and future capacity including East Side Access."

So instead of a new yard being constructed at an entirely separate location, the LIRR is going to build a second yard at Ronkonkoma, just south of the current yard.  The new yard will be built on existing LIRR property, so they won't have to deal with any of those awful NIMBYs. 

The new yard will be similar in size to the current one and will feature facilities for crews as well as the inspection of cars (which will be necessary, because if they are going to use every inch of the existing Ronkonkoma Yard, the Certified North Siding, and the new Mid-Suffolk yard, roughly 30% of the LIRR's current M7 fleet will be spending the night out in Ronkonkoma).

The current timeline for the project, as it stands now, is as follows:

• Preliminary design started in January 2014 (the MTA awarded a $2,295,295 contract to STV Inc. in January for preliminary design services)
• The design/build procurement (RFP) will be issued in April 2015.
• Design/build will begin in January 2016.
• Construction will be completed in January 2018. 

A projected completion date of 2018 gives the LIRR a 3-5 (or more) year cushion for delays in the event the project runs long.  When all the invoices are tallied up, it is expected that the project will cost $76.6 million.

But let's get back to the that the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard is just an awkward workaround and not a real solution for Mainline capacity. 

Consider this analogy: you have a bottle that you want to fill with water.  You place a funnel at the opening at the top to make it easier to get water in.  Currently, you take an entire gallon jug of water and pour it into the funnel so the container can fill up.  But you want to add more water to the container, and you want to do it more quickly.  You could either bring the container and funnel over to your sink, turn the faucet on (i.e. a continual supply of reverse-direction trains), and pour the water from the gallon container in as well (i.e. existing yard capacity).  That will fill the container pretty quickly and evenly.  Or you could take that same container and funnel, but instead of getting more water form a consistent source like a sink faucet, you just get a second gallon-sized container of water (i.e. a second yard), similar to the first one you have.  You open up both gallons of water and try pouring them down the funnel at the same time while hoping the funnel doesn't fill up too unevenly or quickly, overfill, and make a giant mess out of your countertop. 

Yes, the Mid-Suffolk yard is a solution, but it is not a very good one.  It will help slightly, but doing so will only further reduce already limited reverse-peak service, and if there were ever a service disruption (and we all know there often are, especially on the mainline), it would make recovering from one much more difficult because of the awkward equipment imbalance you would be setting up.

And not to mention that such a setup would be very inefficient equipment-wise (and thus cost-wise).  If you're creating a whole new yard, it is very likely that you are going to have 11 whole 12-car train sets that do one rush hour run in the morning, sit around someplace all day, do one rush hour train in the evening, and then spend the entire night in the new yard.  This wastes a lot of equipment, a lot of time, a lot of crews, and a lot of money.  With bi-directional flow, you can have a train do a rush hour run, do a reverse-peak run back out to someplace, then come back again later in the rush or later in the morning, essentially saving you an entire train set. 

Much of the LIRR's equipment and crews already spend much of the day idling around tanning in yards across the island.  Instead of using fewer crews and trains overall, and using the ones that you do have more efficiently all day long, intensifying the awkward peak-direction-focused equipment rotations is only making the railroad more costly and more inefficient to run.  With more reverse peak service, an early peak Babylon Branch train can arrive in Penn Station, turn around, go out to Ronkonkoma, and make another westbound run.  This would save you an entire set of equipment and an entire crew, and who knows how much money over the course of a year (or the course of many years).

And the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard will also have an unmentioned side effect on Huntington.  Currently, service out of Huntington during the peak of the peak period (i.e. when they are throating the mainline) is limited to about 4 or 5 trains.  Currently, the peak throats are not that long, so 4 or 5 trains can cover the span without too many issues, but once you try to expand that throating period (like they will have to do to make the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard useful), you will still have the same 4 or 5 trains in Huntington that will have to last you the entire throating period.  That will result in much wider headways and some nasty crowding conditions out of Huntington.  More cars and more trains simply isn't an option without some sort of permanent solution, but even there the prospect for expansion is dim.

In conclusion,  the Mid-Suffolk Electric Yard is a half-hearted solution to the Mainline's problems.  It will allow for some increase in services, but it will come at substantial costs both operationally and financially in the long-run.  The only real solution is to construct the third Mainline Track all the way to Hicksville.  There really is no alternative.  We can push off the pain of limited mainline capacity onto other areas of the LIRR (particularly the financial area), but it is not a viable solution in the long-term.