Coming to NYC: Penn Station and the Long Island Rail Road

As people arrive to the city that never sleeps they may be a little bit hesitant to move far from where they’ve started. It’s one of the biggest problems of people in a strange place in general but it’s particularly problematic if you’re arriving by train. The different neighborhoods that are the train stops that make up the island of Manhattan are as wily and different as can be and unfortunately, most of them are littered with panhandlers and shysters who give the city an all around bad image.

If you’re coming into New York City on the train you’re coming in on one of four lines; PATH train (commuter line from New Jersey) Metro-North (commuter train from points North and East; Westchester, Connecticut, etc) LIRR (commuter train from points generally East; Long Island) or Amtrak (everywhere else; generally from points West or far North all over the country)

LIRR: The busiest commuter rail line in North America also enters Penn Station with nearly 500 daily round trips across more than 700 miles of track. Long Island Rail Road also services Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn which offers easy service to Lower Manhattan and there are a few trains which service Long Island City Queens in a day which has easy access to Midtown Manhattan’s East Side. With over 81 million passengers serviced annually and as the oldest operating railroad still under the same name, LIRR maintains its relevance with more than ¼ million passengers ever weekday.

Penn Station is the main inflow for LIRR but there are also stops at Flatbush Avenue and in Long Island City. Flatbush Avenue (or Atlantic Terminal) is the LIRR terminal which runs alongside the convergence of several different subway lines in the western portion of Brooklyn. If you find yourself with Brooklyn as your destination, there is a huge mega-plex shopping center which has such retailers as Target, Victoria’s Secret, GameStop, Men’s Warehouse, Circuit City, Mandee, and the food services of Cold Stone Creamery, McDonald’s, Mrs. Fields, Starbucks, Pizza Hut Express, and Chuck E. Cheese’s to name just a few.

Many of the people coming in from Long Island to the Atlantic Terminal are just going to work downtown in Manhattan which is very nearby across the river. Atlantic Terminal offers the ability for people to just hop on the train and arrive in a couple of minutes; the stations that are serviced at Atlantic Terminal are the B, D, M, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the C train runs very nearby. All of these make easy access to the many areas of downtown which is fairly easy to navigate once you get your bearings about yourself anyway.

Also serviced by the LIRR, though not nearly as much as either of the other two stations, is the Hunters Point terminal; even less often trains also make their way to the terminal at Long Island City. The one advantage to the Hunters Point Station is that you can pick up the #7 Train and the Q67 bus; the Long Island City stop, while still serviced by busses it not near the trains so it is primarily intended for people who are going to any of the businesses on the East River side of Queens. Two of the major drawbacks about both of these terminals are that there is only service during the rush hours in the direction of rush hour traffic and that the majority of service is completed by diesel trains.