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Serving a quarter-million impatient commuters may be a 'can't win.'
It's like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, only these bulls are of the Wall Street variety. Pennsylvania Station's departure board lights up for the 5:26 express to Port Washington and it's "Game On" for several hundred Long Island Rail Road commuters, who stampede toward the designated platform. You don't want to get in their way, because this is an aggressive crowd with a single-minded purpose: To wrangle a seat for the ride home.
Joe Lee, who commutes to Port Washington from his job as an information technology specialist at Morgan Stanley, describes his nightly game plan: "As soon as I get to Penn Station, I wait by the McDonald's. My trains are usually on tracks 20/21 or 18/19, so I'll be one of the first few to board. The Main Concourse is like a sea of people to swim through. By getting to the right entrance, I can avoid most of that."
Kyle Mullins, a senior at Regis High School in Manhattan, prefers to avoid Penn Station altogether. "For the record, it's overcrowded, and it takes forever to get there from the East Side [of Manhattan]." To reach his home in suburban Valley Stream, he often starts his journey with a subway ride to Woodside, in the borough of Queens, then walks down the stairs to board , the LIRR. "The number of connecting trains allows me multiple paths in and out of the city," said Mullins, "and it also allows me to meet up with my friends from other parts of the Island."
The Long Island Rail Road is all about people - lots of them - from the 262,000 who ride it each weekday and the 6,300 people who run it, to the 7.4 million who call Long Island home. It makes perfect sense that this 324-mile system and the 120-mile island it crisscrosses share the same name; each wouldn't be what it is today without the other.
But as with most interdependent relationships, there's an ambivalence here that cuts both ways. For many commuters, the LIRR is the thing they love to hate, and the railroad suffers its share of slings and arrows. As one locomotive engineer, himself...