Ali Watkins and Edgar Sandoval

So went the first two nights of the plan designed to avoid the dreaded L train apocalypse: a partial shutdown of the subway line that carries 400,000 riders each weekday. The repair work, which began Friday, means significantly fewer trains will run on nights and weekends while the line’s key tunnel linking New York City’s Brooklyn and Manhattan boroughs undergoes an overhaul to fix damage from Hurricane Sandy for the next 15-18 months.

Work is expected to halt by 5 a.m. Monday, but the impact on the morning rush remains an open question.

Despite doomsday predictions of long turnstile lines, closed station entrances and dangerously crowded platforms, the L train’s first rehab weekend went as well as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could have hoped.

Crowds grew, but then dissipated. Friday night hitches were smoothed by Saturday. Trains ran consistently, usually arriving every 20 minutes, as promised, lending tentative optimism to anxious riders.

“The trains are running. It’s not so bad,” said Melissa Lindstrom, 46, who caught a Brooklyn-bound L train out of Union Square on Saturday night.

Weighing heavily in the MTA’s favor was its near miss with a complete shutdown of the transit line — a far more disruptive initial plan. An 11th-hour proposal from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to shut down each of the tunnel’s tubes one at a time, and to limit work to nights and weekends, was hastily adopted in January.

The bait-and-switch left even this weekend’s most annoyed riders grateful to have avoided the alternative.

“It’s a huge inconvenience obviously,” said Trell Chandler, 25, a Bushwick-based graduate student. “A complete shutdown would had been worse. So this is better.

The worst of the slowdown’s impact came Friday night. Trains fell behind scheduled arrival times, leaving platforms crowded and riders late and angry. Tension was particularly high in Manhattan as straphangers were making the workday trek back to Brooklyn.

Matthew Ming, 35, was trying to get across the river from a crowded Union Square station, which saw rush-hour size crowds late into the night Friday. Arrival clocks were not working, many trains were late or were held at stations to let other trains pass through.

The work trains also clogged tunnels, adding to the congestion and headaches.

“This is the worst train in the world,” Ming said. “There is always a problem. Now I have to wait 45 minutes. They said train delays are 20 minutes. They are lying.”

Still, MTA officials seemed pleasantly surprised that the slowdown’s opening night went off without a major hitch. Andy Byford, president of New York City Transit, an arm of the authority that runs the subway and buses, said Friday that he was “pleased” with the rollout, and expected problems with schedules and arrival clocks to be fixed by Saturday. For the most part, he was right.

“I’m grateful to New Yorkers for their patience and good humor while they got used to the revised service,” he said Sunday in a statement.

It was the first weekend in what will be an extended hiatus for the L train’s regular service. Struggles remain, and they are not all train-related: During planning, transit officials said they were concerned that tunnel repairs could produce dangerous levels of silica dust, an airborne mineral that can cause lung cancer. The MTA has since said it is confident the work will not pose a risk, but it has not allayed all riders’ concerns.

Transit officials had said they would post the silica dust level online to inform the public about any potential hazards, but on Sunday they declined to disclose the level and said the broader air quality level, not specifically the silica reading, would be available on the MTA website every Friday. They also declined to say how much the new contract for the repair work, under Cuomo’s approach, would cost.

“Safety is our first priority, and we are continuously monitoring the air and dust levels which were far below standards for both safety and customer comfort, as we would expect with the vastly reduced demolition that we are doing under this project and with our robust dust mitigation plan,” said Maxwell Young, spokesman for the authority.

How riders will handle the long-term adjustment remains to be seen. The repairs are scheduled to take nearly 1-1/2 years, but one MTA worker at the Bedford station said this weekend what many riders were thinking: These things never stay on schedule.

This article originally appeared in <a id="202af42b-e948-3379-a2da-1612e3717d04" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/nyregion/l-train-service.html">The New York Times</a>.

L train slowdown: First weekend disruption is frustrating, but not disastrous

NEW YORK — The crowds? Large, but not mutinous. The annoyance levels during the inaugural weekend of the L train slowdown? Present, but predictable.

Transit officials had said they would post the silica dust level online to inform the public about any potential hazards, but Sunday they declined to disclose the level or say when it would be available online. They also declined to say how much the new contract for the repair work, under Cuomo’s approach, would cost.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/nyregion/l-train-service.html" id="202af42b-e948-3379-a2da-1612e3717d04">The New York Times</a>.

L Train Slowdown: First Weekend Disruption Is Frustrating, but Not Disastrous

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Ali Watkins and Edgar Sandoval

Articles written by the author

L train slowdown: First weekend disruption is frustrating, but not disastrous

L Train Slowdown: First Weekend Disruption Is Frustrating, but Not Disastrous