List of Long Island Rail Road stations

The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is a commuter railway system serving all four counties of Long Island, with one station in the Manhattan borough of New York City in the U.S. state of New York. Its operator is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York. Serving 301,763 passengers per day as of 2007[1] and 88.5 million riders for the year of 2008,[2] it is the busiest commuter railroad in the United States. The 594-mile (956 km)[1] system spans both ends of Long Island, from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to the west, to Montauk station at the tip of the southern fork to the east. Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan is the actual westernmost station of the Long Island Rail Road and is also its busiest station.

The system currently has 124 stations on eleven rail lines called "branches".[1] (Not included in this count are two additional stations that serve employees of the LIRR: Hillside Facility and Boland's Landing.) Two stations are open seasonally: Belmont Park and Mets–Willets Point; in addition, the Pinelawn station exclusively serves cemeteries in its area and is thus served during daytime hours. Hunterspoint Avenue and Long Island City are open only on weekdays. The six stations on the Greenport Branch are provided limited service. Jamaica is a major transfer station between branches, as it provides the interchange from the eastern Long Island stations to the western New York terminals and vice versa. Other inter-branch transfer stations include Woodside, Mineola, Hicksville, Valley Stream, Lynbrook and Babylon. The Huntington, Ronkonkoma and Babylon stations provide transfers between electric-train service and diesel-train service within their respective branches, the Port Jefferson, Ronkonkoma/Greenport and Babylon/Montauk branches.

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Contents
[hide]*1 Lines
 * 2 Station Types
 * 3 Historical preservation of stations
 * 4 List of stations
 * 5 Disused and former stations
 * 6 References
 * 7 Further reading
 * 8 External links
 * }

[edit] Lines
Jamaica and the two employees-only stations are not included in the station counts for lines below.

[edit] Station Types
The Long Island Rail Road utilizes different types of stations. Most stations are about "12 car lengths" (which means that they can fit 12 M1, M3, M7 cars (the electric trains that are primarily used), but there are a few that are shorter. The shorter stations are more common as you move east.

There are 4 main types of station construction:
 * Underground-Stations completely enclosed beneath buildings (only some western terminals)
 * Grade-level-Stations that are at ground height (most common)
 * Elevated-Stations that are above ground height (less common, primarily used on the entire Babylon Branch)
 * Open-cut-Stations that are below ground level, yet are not enclosed at the top, left open. (Only a few stations on the Port Washington Branch use this type of construction).

[edit] Historical preservation of stations
Five LIRR stations are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Sea Cliff, Oyster Bay, Farmingdale, Greenport and East Hampton. Southampton Station is a contributing property to a historic district on the NRHP. Other stations that aren't on the list are often cherished by local communities and treated as landmarks, such as Islip, Northport, Glen Street, and Great Neck. Roslyn, Glen Cove, and Locust Valley are other stations on the Oyster Bay Branch that are historic. Efforts to save the original East Williston station house in 2004 proved to be disappointing when the structure was found to be too unstable, while the demolition of Amagansett's in 1965 brought public outcry throughout the Hamptons as well as among local railfans that has lasted for decades.

The St. James station house, built in 1873, is the oldest such building constructed by the LIRR that remains standing. Hewlett's station house is older, but it was originally built by the South Side Railroad of Long Island in 1870. On the West Hempstead Branch, Malverne's station house is the only one originally built during the first two decades of the 20th Century, although it is not recognized an a historic landmark. The elaborate Forest Hills station house was one of the few to avoid modernization during the mid-to-late 20th Century and has retained the original grand decorative construction. When the Babylon Branch was elevated in the post-WW II era, former station houses in Wantagh and Lindenhurst were moved away from the tracks. The former Wantagh station was transfromed into a museum, and also listed on the NRHP.

[edit] List of stations
This list contains all stations currently open on the Long Island Rail Road (including seasonal-use stations).

[edit] Disused and former stations
These stations are either demolished or existing but not currently in use by the Long Island Rail Road. Several stations of the Rockaway Beach Branch and Far Rockaway Branch were taken over by the New York City Subway as the IND Rockaway Line in 1956.