No A Trains to Lefferts Boulevard for Nine Days: the Liberty Avenue Shutdown Starts Saturday
From 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7 to 5 a.m. Monday, Nov. 16, A trains will not run between Rockaway Boulevard and Ozone Park-Lefferts Boulevard — free shuttle buses cover the gap while the MTA replaces track, switches and third rail for new signals.
Ozone Park's A train is about to take a nine-day break. From 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 7 until 5 a.m. on Monday, November 16, no A trains will run between Rockaway Boulevard and Ozone Park-Lefferts Boulevard, the MTA says — a full shutdown of the Liberty Avenue end of the line, with free shuttle buses covering the gap.
The replacement plan has two halves. The shuttles stop along Liberty Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard, from 93rd Street out to Lefferts Boulevard, making the stops the trains will not. And the A itself does not simply vanish at Rockaway Boulevard: Lefferts-bound A trains will run instead to Howard Beach-JFK Airport, so riders whose trip continues toward the Rockaways keep a train, while riders bound for the Lefferts Boulevard branch — Aqueduct, Ozone Park — ride the bus for the last stretch. Either way, the trip takes longer than the timetable says, and the first commute it touches is Monday, November 9.
The work is the kind that cannot be done between trains. The MTA is replacing track, switches and third rail on the Liberty Avenue Line so it can install new signals — Communications-Based Train Control, the system that lets dispatchers run trains closer together and therefore more often. The new signals will cover the A and C from High Street in Brooklyn out to Lefferts, replacing the oldest signal equipment in the subway system. The Fulton and Liberty Avenue signal project costs $1.9 billion, and congestion pricing revenue pays for nearly all of it — the toll drivers pay in Manhattan is, on this line, quite literally buying the signals.
Nine days is a long closure, and the MTA says more periodic service changes are coming on the line as the project proceeds, with details to follow. For Lefferts Boulevard riders, the practical advice is the standing kind: check the MTA's service notices before traveling, build the shuttle bus into the trip, and expect the first morning — Saturday's start is 12:30 a.m., before most riders are awake to notice — to be the easy part. Monday morning is the test.
