(The following story by Andy Newman appeared on the New York Times website on August 27, 2010.)
NEW YORK — The good news from Long Island Rail Road is that its summer Cannonball trains to Montauk (via the Hamptons and other weekend destinations) will be running as scheduled this afternoon and Friday — starting at 4:06 p.m. today.
The bad news is that that’s about all the good news there is, as the railroad and its riders muddle through a third day of reduced service after the electrical fire Monday that brought down its aged signaling system at Jamaica.
Technicians began running tests on the switches Wednesday night and turned up “some evidence of additional wire damage” said Joseph Calderone, a spokesman for the railroad.
Tests will probably continue into the weekend, Mr. Calderone said, and there is no firm estimate of when the system will pass all its tests and the railroad can return to its full schedule — certainly not this week.
For now, train switches at the Jamaica hub are being manually moved into place the extremely old-fashioned way, with mallets and spikes, as they have been since Monday. This method has limited the railroad’s capacity to running about three-quarters of its morning trains and two-thirds of its afternoon trains.
“At this point,” Mr. Calderone said, “we’re taking it day by day.”