(The following story by Jennifer Maloney appeared on the Newsday website on July 12.)
NEW YORK — Helena Williams calls them “nonspeak” — those oblique railroad announcements that don’t say why, exactly, your train is being delayed.
And she’s getting rid of them.
Williams, the Long Island Rail Road’s new president, said Thursday she’s nixing phrases such as “police activity on the right-of-way” in favor of announcements and e-mail alerts that tell riders what’s actually going on.
The ubiquitous “signal problems” message especially irks her, she said. “I want to be specific,” she said Thursday at an LIRR commuters council meeting in Manhattan. “If Amtrak has a train in the tunnel, I want to say Amtrak has a train in the tunnel.”
And when news outlets are reporting live on a brush fire near the tracks, it makes no sense to tell riders they are being delayed by “police activity,” she said. “It makes our conductors look like they don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “If they’re going to hear it … on their cell phones, we don’t have to use what I call nonspeak language.”
Improved communication was the first on a long list of commuter concerns Williams addressed Thursday.
Speaking about the railroad’s poor-performing diesel fleet, she called the situation “bleak” but pledged to hire a third-party consultant to improve the reliability of dual-mode locomotives. So far this year, dual modes have performed dismally, breaking down on average every 10,000 miles — 30 times more often than the M-7 fleet.
Williams also announced the launch of a new gap-safety awareness campaign, which will warn boarding customers to step aside and allow passengers first to exit the train. Orderly boarding should reduce gap falls because many gap accidents are precipitated by a slip, trip or fall while entering or exiting the train, she said.