LIRR finally arrives at NYC Grand Central Terminal, ending 26-year project with total $12.7 billion cost

The first Long Island Rail Road train arrived at Grand Central Terminal on Wednesday morning, ending a 26-year project that will ease Manhattan commutes for thousands of people in Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Excited passengers — mostly history and railroad fans, as well as Gov. Hochul and MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber — were aboard the first train as it departed from Track 1 at Jamaica Station in Queens on time at 10:45 a.m.

The train ran express to Grand Central, arriving on time 22 minutes later, at 11:07 a.m., on Track 302 of the LIRR’s brand-new platforms 175 feet below Park Ave. in Midtown.

It was a smooth ride. “You don’t even feel the curves or the change of tracks,” observed Andrew Albert, a longtime MTA board member.

Albert — who was on the board when planning for the project began in 1997 — thought the train ran a bit slowly through Queens but made up time in the tunnel beneath the East River.

“It was quite a journey to get here,” Hochul said afterward in remarks that touted the project’s advantages to commuters. “We are giving them something that’s precious — we are giving them time back into their lives.”

Stephen Quigley, a 71-year-old Babylon, L.I., retiree, regretted that the LIRR service to Grand Central he rode with other railway fans Wednesday morning wasn’t available during the years he commuted to a job in Rockefeller Center. “This would have saved me so much time,” he said.

Another excited rider on that first train was Lawrence Graff, 51, who works for Five Star Electric, a major contractor on the project. “The train is going to come in on the platforms my company built,” he said.

The new LIRR Grand Central platforms — dubbed Grand Central Madison by Hochul last year — include eight tracks served by four platforms on two levels. Construction of the station and the tracks and tunnels leading to it cost about $11.1 billion; counting financing, its final price tag will be around $12.7 billion.

The platforms and the concourses serving them are gleaming white. “I’ve seen the concourse and caverns go from dirt floors to marble,” said Graff, who lives in Warwick, Orange County.

“It’s beautiful. The artwork is beautiful,” Albert said of the station, which despite its deep underground location appears bright, open and clean.

But there’s one drawback commuters might consider: “It’s just that it’s 17 floors down,” Albert said. “You need to leave time to get to the street.”

A trip between the LIRR platforms and the E. 47th St. and Madison Ave. entrance took 3½ minutes Wednesday. Roughly half that time, about 1 minute and 40 seconds, was spent on an escalator ride.

“I would use that time as meditation time,” Hochul suggested.

The street-level entrances along Madison Ave. north of E. 45th St. are definitely a quicker way to reach the LIRR tracks than walking from Grand Central’s Main Concourse. It takes about three minutes to walk from the subway shuttle entrance below the Main Concourse to the top of the E. 45th St. escalator.

For at least the next three weeks, the LIRR plans to run shuttle service between Grand Central and Jamaica. About half the shuttle trains will run express while the rest will stop in Queens, at Woodside, Forest Hills and Kew Gardens.

Once the shakedown period is over, the LIRR plans to start a regular schedule into the new terminal from points in Queens, Nassau and Suffolk.

The new service was exciting enough to Matt Botta that he journeyed from Hamilton Heights in Manhattan to Jamaica on Wednesday morning to be aboard the first train. “It’s an historic day,” said Botta, 31, a tech worker and former Long Island resident.

But he wondered if the MTA didn’t have better uses for its resources.

“I’m a little skeptical of the full value of this,” he said. “More people are working remote. Grand Central and Penn Station aren’t that far apart. I hope this doesn’t crowd out other priorities for the MTA.”