Woohoo! No. 7 train weekend service back in action just in time for spring
No. 7 train will grace these tracks again this weekend, LIC
We have never used the word ‘woohoo’ in a title, but in this case, it probably doesn’t even do the news justice. It seems that our friends over at the MTA (yes, now they’re our friends) have finished the 7 train repairs three weekends ahead of schedule, and Long Island City’s precious chariot will operate on its regular weekend schedule, starting this coming weekend. That deserves another woohoo.
In the NY1 video below though, there is a little line at the end from the MTA about how there’s no work scheduled on the 7 train until the fall. Not sure what that’s about, but we have a whole spring and summer to plan the inevitable political protests. We jest, but hey it seems to have worked this time. Or maybe the MTA just got a better PR firm.
Glad to hear it’s back to ‘normal.’ Good news!
Maybe, just maybe, all our voices made a difference.
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.
So, does this winter B.S. really happen EVERY year? Because I truly don’t remember it from 2008, my first winter here. But maybe the PTSD has kicked in and blacked it out of my memory.
I’m seriously going to think about resigning my lease if this is an annual thing. Please let me know if you have the scoop!
Further proof of the incompetence of the MTA.
Yes this happens every year, at least it has for the last 6 years. Usually it is a smattering of random weekends but recently it seems to be a stretch of weekends all in a row.
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!!!
#7 is correct.
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.
Something is wrong here. How could they have been 4 weekends off in assessing the work? In any scenario, the road leads to MTA disorganization. Are the engineers in charge so incompetent, that they can’t accurately assess a project timeline? Or is the MTA cutting corners just to cover up bad PR? Or did they really actually just do the work quickly instead of the usual foot-dragging, which was said above. None of those possibilities are very comforting, especially since the 7train goes THROUGH A RIVER.
#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?
10, yes, it’s not such a bad walk to the E if it isn’t late at night, you don’t have any physical disability, the weather isn’t cold or miserable, you aren’t carrying heavy packages, aren’t dealing with your kids, aren’t old or frail, don’t mind being dumped out at 59th Street instead of 42nd Street, or you don’t mind the added time to your commute. Besides that, nobody has any problem walking to the E.
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.
#14 the MTA should hire you as a consultant.
#12, the reason that this stretch needs work consistently is because of the curved track between hunters point and queens plaza.
#16, that is the BS that the MTA would have you believe. Look at a subway map. There are plently of subway lines with as much or greater curves and none of them are shut down for several weekend each year for the past 20 years. Why is that? Even if there is something special about this section of track doesn’t that mean that the need since articulated can be better anticipated and handled in a more thoughtful manner than annual shutdowns spanning weeks?
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).
I think that #4 is dead on. These guys need to justify their existence and working slow is one way to do it. The same thing happens with Con Ed.
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.
The 7 was not running at rush hour on Monday and again one day last week.
What was that about?
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”?)
Now I’m worried that because they didn’t finish the work properly (or whatever is the case) they are going to shut down weekday service regularly. It’s been more than a couple times in the last few months I’ve gone on a weekday and the 7 is randomly closed. I totally rely on the 7 train and it has been ruining my life lately.
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.
I believe its easy to complain and get aggravated over rumors, I agree it is extremely frustrating to go through this once a year, but if we are going to ask the MTA to fix this we have to be more specific and provide options:
I don’t know these figures but perhaps we can get more informed through this mean.
1. How many people use the 7 at Vernon Jackson, Hunters Point, and Queens Plaza?
2. What is the current population in LIC?
3. How many people use the 7 on weekend when it is running?
If we can get some of these figures, we can find out what the loss of revenue to the city and to the neighborhood. With these numbers we may be able to get the same treatment that the METS get and perhaps show the MTA that getting the job done completely may be more efficient to the city than breaking it up over 2 month periods at a time (Jan/Feb) every year.
Without facts its just noise, I don’t have these facts and the 2000 Census is way too old to use as a data source.
According to the 2000 numbers LIC had roughly 25,000 people living here with an expected 3.6% growth. This would put us at 35,600 currently, but this does not take into consideration any of the new buildings that have been added since 2000 (City lights was the only tower in the neighborhood at the time). Since then we have added:
2 Avalon towers
3 Rockrose towers
The Gantry
The Foundry
The Powerhouse
5SL
The Badge Building
Aris Lofts
Ten63 Jackson
10-50 Jackson
The Viscaya
Fusion
Solarium
2 Hunters View Towers
L House
Echelon
…
#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…
If you live at the waterfront it is more like a 10 minute walk to the E train, and with a kid forget about it 20 easy. That is not convenient or easy. The price we pay to live over here is mostly based the easy access to Manhattan from the vernon/jackson 7 train subway stop.
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.
I don’t know who these people are who feel its necessary to point out the alternate routes into the city. Yes, we know where the E train is. That’s not the point.
There are businesses here that depend on the 7 train for their customers. What about them? The issue is one of a disfunctional agency who has never been held to account for its actions here.
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?
Yep, 30. None of the MTA’s excuses hold up under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
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.
I’m not an engineer either and while the the explanation you offer is plausible there are some holes:
1) there are two tracks, one going in each direction. one could be shut for repairs while the other is operational this is not unheard of and happens on many subway lines
2) If the unique nature of the tracks are the cause of the issue then it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Why isn’t there a better plan in place that involes more frequent, but less intrusive repair work?
3) what do the tunnel fans have to do with any of this if the track work is taking place up by Court Square?
4) the 4,5 trains make sweeping 120 degree turn while decending deep under the East River into brooklyn. I’ve not heard of similar service issues on those lines.
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This is good news but 3 weekends ahead of schedule with 1 weekend lost due to the snow? Seems quite convenient given all the bad press they’ve received from the 7 train shutdown. I just hope they didn’t “cut any corners”.