Woohoo! No. 7 train weekend service back in action just in time for spring

Glad to hear it’s back to ‘normal.’ Good news!

Maybe they originally gave themselves a very generous deadline so that they could stretch out the OT hours with minimal effort on any day. But now because of the heat on them, managers are pushing the workers to actually work and get it done when they should have.

Further proof of the incompetence of the MTA.

It’s been going on as long as I have lived here and that is 14 years. Maybe they gave the project generous time so that it got done properly and allowed time for any problems that might come up. There is also the construction of the escalator to link the E&V directly, going on at the court square stop too. Remember, the trains have to be fixed sometime and believe it or not, other parts of the city also are dealing with inconviences of train track repairs. Be glad you don’t live on second ave!!!

It will be down again in the fall. The good news is that it is baseball season and the 7 train will NEVER be down when the METS are in town.

It’s not such a bad walk to the E/F trains.

#11, most likely it is a combination of all of the above. Your concerns are valid. No one has been able to answer the question as to why the same section of track requires so much work so consistently. Why aren’t other sections of the thousands of miles of track in the system shut down periodically to conduct extensive repairs that cover several weekends?

we don’t have a bus that goes into Manhattan right? From Hunters Point. Seems like 11th street, going north straight onto the Bridge, is the perfect place for a bus. Or one right into the midtown tunnel.

#12, the reason that this stretch needs work consistently is because of the curved track between hunters point and queens plaza.

I have always thought it just a money saving measure they take every year and disguise it as “track work” because they know they can get away with it. Nobody in queens has ever raised a loud enough voice to complain until now, and that is thanks in part to the population explosion here in hunters point.

I once spoke to one of the track workers in frustration asking him how long and what the heck are they doing. He agreed with me that the work was disorganized busy work and couldnt even really say what they were doing. (for whatever that’s worth).

Yes, sob stories of people at their time of the month getting no sleep or trudging through snow with groceries and children in tow at 2:30AM really motivated the MTA to speed up the work. Woe is you.

18, you said exactly what I’ve been complaining about to my (poor) wife all these years! I think the work is a combination of two things: (1) they have normal maintenance they need to do on the No. 7 and have taken their sweet ass time with it, compared with sped up, efficient schedules on track in Manhattan. If they actually had crews working solidly around the clock on any given weekend, instead of farting around scratching their asses, they could probably do whatever needs to be done in a fraction of the time. And (2) they use the shutdowns as a pretext to save money and perhaps divert resources that would otherwise go to the No. 7 when it’s operating elsewhere to the system. The jig is up, finally! (or is it “gig is up”?)

The MTA knows that historically most of the No.7 ridership has been new immigrants that have very little political pull, but pay the same fare as everyone else none the less. They also knew that Hunters Point had a very small population to make a difference and politicians probably had better fights to pick that represented more votes. However, this has changed in the past few years and the community is speaking up. A big thank you to all that got involved and I must say that I will miss the LIC Express bus that got me to GC in less than 5 min.

#13 – are the E,V trains really that bad for you? They actually provide great access throughout Manhattan – across 53rd St and down Sixth and Eighth Avenues, not just dead ended into Times Square. I don’t get why people feel so isolated without the #7, when an extra three minute walk to 44th and 21st Street saves as much or more time than transferring from the 7 across the moat anyway…

26, sorry, the E is a terrible substitute if you are headed downtown on the East Side. I work weekends on 14th St near 3rd Avenue. When the 7 is running and I make the connection to the downtown IRT, I’m at work in 20 minutes, sometimes less, door to door. I’ll put up with occasional work on the subway, but I just don’t trust that the MTA knows what it is doing.

The anger and hostility seen at the meeting and here are representative of the frustration and suspicion that people have of being lied to. I also subscribe the the conspiracy theory that this is a disguised service cut. Given the bloated overhead of the MTA, it would not surprise me if cutting service for 8 weekends frees up a few million in the budget. None of the explainations make any sense to me. Curved tracks, or that that work can not be done at late night. Oh really, well what do you do when when the hundreds of miles of track below ground need work? Do you bring the sun down there to make repairs?

I’m neither an engineer nor an MTA employee, but I thought I would try to explain my understanding of the issue.

The 7 line has a couple of unique attributes that make this annual service repair necessary but painful to us riders. The track just east of Hunters Point station is configured such that the track simultaneously climbs (going from underground to an elevated railway) and bends quite sharply to the north. The heavy subway cars put incredible stress on the tracks, and if there are any engineers here they could probably give more info about how this “movement in two dimensions” (i.e., simultaneous climb and bend) is different from just a bend in the tracks that all of the subway lines have. The upshot is that the track must be re-aligned and re-ballasted every year to correct the effects that the stress causes.

All of the subway lines need routine maintenance, of course, but they can usually be re-routed onto different lines or travel through a different tunnel under the East River than they usually use. So the A/C can be re-routed from local onto express tracks or vice versa, or onto another line to travel under the river. The 7 local and express run on the same tracks in the LIC area, and the 7 doesn’t share a point with another lines on both the east and west sides of the River. (So, the 7 could run on the F line from Queensboro Plaza into Manhattan, but that would just duplicate service and really wouldn’t do any of us any good who usually board at stations south/west of Queensboro Plaza.)

I have no idea why this work finished early (not complaining!), and I do wish MTA would put a shuttle bus to Grand Central in place during these outages.

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/12/02/2009-12-02_report_mta_crews_slackin_on_tracks.html#ixzz0YYZgVnJa