L Train Repairs Will Be Done 3 Months Early, Cuomo Says

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — Straphangers will only have to deal with the L train project, which has slowed down or halted trains on the subway line for months, a little while longer, officials announced.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that the L train repairs expected to take 15 to 18 months will end ahead of schedule and instead wrap up in April, about a year after the subway line first started slowing down trains to rehab the Canarsie tunnel's Hurricane Sandy damage.

Work is already done on one of the tunnel's two tubes and will move on to the next tube with the time that is left, Cuomo said. The L project will also finish upgrading stations along the subway line during the remaining months.

The governor said the project, which will also end on budget, is an example of successfully thinking "outside the box." The L train was originally going to fully shut down before, to the surprise of straphangers and transit officials, Cuomo had engineers come up with a new way to do the repairs in January.

"This project will ultimately be a case study for how the MTA needs to operate going forward," the governor said during a tour of the tunnel Sunday. "I again want to thank our academic partners who collaborated to develop these innovative techniques and I commend the new MTA leadership for their work so far."

The repair project has made it so the L train only runs every 20 minutes on weeknights and weekends since it kicked off in April.

But some weeks have seen even more limited service, including two weeks of no overnight servicefor a large swath of Brooklyn stops that started last Monday.

Most of the additional slowdowns have been because the MTA is moving from rehabbing the tunnel to renovating certain stations along the subway line. That work will also stop L trains from stopping at certain Manhattan stations in October and November.

The tunnel work on the first Canarsie tube included new fire-resistant cables, new tracks and a new fiber-optic monitoring system.

The work is part of an approach that has never been used in the United States before. It was developed by experts Cuomo brought in from Cornell and Columbia University.

"[The] entire team deserves immense credit for working with a sense of urgency and purpose that have delivered the first part of this project much more rapidly than anticipated," MTA Chairman Patrick Foye said. "...Today is a good day for the MTA."