Late-Night Subway Tuesday: the 42nd Street Shuttle Runs All Night, the 7 Skips Two Queens Stops, and the A Still Ends at Rockaway Boulevard
The overnight railroad has one piece of good news this week — the 42nd Street Shuttle, which normally sleeps, runs overnight Tuesday through Friday — and it shares the small hours with the week's standing detours: Flushing-bound 7 trains skipping 52nd and 69th, uptown locals skipping seven Manhattan stops, and an A train that still does not go to Lefferts Boulevard.
The novelty first, because late-night transit news so rarely contains one: from Tuesday through Friday, between 12:01 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., the 42nd Street Shuttle runs overnight as extra service, on the MTA's published planned-work page. The Shuttle is the system's shortest line and normally one of its earliest to bed; for four nights this week it simply keeps going, stitching Grand Central to Times Square through the hours when the rest of the railroad is at its thinnest.
The standing patterns fill the rest of the night. In Queens, Flushing-bound 7 trains skip 52nd Street and 69th Street, and every train at Woodside-61st Street boards from the Manhattan-bound platform — with boarding changes also in force at Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue and Hunters Point Avenue for the Steinway Tunnel work, per the live 7-line status feed. In Manhattan, the week's uptown local skip pattern runs again from 11:15 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.: 72nd, 81st, 86th, 96th, 103rd, 110th and 116th Streets are passed by, on the Mon-Fri pattern that runs through Nov. 13.
And in Queens again, the week's biggest closure is now in its fourth day: no A trains between Rockaway Boulevard and Ozone Park-Lefferts Boulevard, through Monday, Nov. 16 at 5 a.m., while crews modernize signals on the Fulton and Liberty lines. Trains that would end at Lefferts Boulevard run instead to Howard Beach-JFK Airport, and the free T366 shuttle bus covers 104th Street, 111th Street and Lefferts Boulevard — the arrangement the MTA published before the nine-day closure began on Nov. 7.
Put the pieces together and Tuesday night's railroad is a familiar November bargain: planned work everywhere, one small line working overtime to compensate, and a shuttle bus in Queens doing the unglamorous work of an entire branch. Riders out after midnight should check the MTA's alerts before leaving — planned changes are the floor, not the ceiling, of what the overnight subway can do to a trip.
