Lirr

The Long Island Rail Road is expected to run at 60% of capacity during the evening rush hour after a fire in a switching tower shut down almost the entire system on Monday, stranding thousands of commuters across Long Island and at Penn Station.

  
    Sarah Tilly, hoping to catch a train to Long Island for her vacation on Fire Island, stands next to her suitcases as she listens for news of train cancellations at Penn Station.

Service stopped on every part of the railroad except the Port Washington branch just before 11 a.m. Monday. The LIRR said Monday afternoon that “very limited” service was resuming through Jamaica. But the railroad will operate fewer trains than normal, and the 100,000 LIRR commuters leaving New York City will likely face delays and crowded trains.

“Once we lose control of the cable and switch systems, we do not move trains” for safety purposes, LIRR President Helena Williams said Monday.

Passengers heading back to Long Island will have to line up outside Penn Station before going onto trains. Police were going to be on hand for crowd control, Williams said. All trains were going to make local stops.

“There’s a high enough density of train service, even at 60%, that we’ll be able to get our customers home,” she said.

The fire knocked out the large, decades-old switching machine in a tower east of Jamaica Station in Queens. Workers at the tower were briefly evacuated, and the railroad suspended service on almost all of its lines. Firefighters quickly put out the fire, but the railroad was still trying to figure out how much damage had been caused.

Workers at the switching tower control which trains go onto which tracks by flipping a series of levers. LIRR crews spent much of the afternoon setting routes manually with an old-fashioned system called blocking-and-spiking, Charles said.

Richard Jerothe, a 45-year-old executive at a Brooklyn medical transportation company, boarded a 10:11 train at Ronkonkoma headed for Atlantic Terminal. But the train only made it as far as Floral Park, where it sat for hours. Late for an important meeting to discuss backup generators for ambulance depots, Mr. Jerothe’s hopes were briefly lifted when he heard an announcement that the railroad was preparing bus service. But 45 minutes later, he said, another announcement told him there would be no buses.

“The crews on the trains have absolutely no information coming down from corporate or from management to let them know what’s going on,” Jerothe said. “It puts them in a really tough position.”

Charles, the LIRR spokesman, said the railroad has been trying to disseminate information through its e-mail alert system and the news media.

In Manhattan, Maureen Michaels was deciding Monday afternoon whether to share a car service home to Cold Spring Harbor with her sister. Michaels, who chairs the LIRR Commuter Council, wanted to get home to help her daughter pack for her freshman year of college. She blasted the LIRR for not having plans in place to deal with the outage.

“I think that there should be buses parked right out in front of Penn Station,” she said. “They need a contingency plan … other than ‘we’re going to run trains few and far between’.”