NYCT to perform FASTRACK maintenance on Lexington Avenue
Written by jrood
For four straight weeknights beginning Monday, January 9, a small army of Metropolitan Transportation Authority New York City Transit workers will perform more than 300 maintenance tasks in stations and tunnels along a segment of the Lexington Avenue 4, 5 and 6 Line stretching between Grand Central-42nd Street and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Service will be suspended in both directions between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Workers will perform a variety of tasks that can be accomplished much more safely and efficiently in the absence of train service. Maintenance workers will take this opportunity to inspect track, repair or replace track components and perform power and signal inspection and maintenance tasks. Maintenance-of-way crews will also clean and scrape dried mud from the roadbed, which will help ensure signal reliability.
In stations, workers will also be able to do spot painting, repair platform edges, wall tiles and lighting in addition to performing power washing at some of the closed stations. By shutting down a section of a subway line, work can be done more efficiently and at less cost, in many cases taking days to complete tasks that would normally take weeks.
“All of this is work that must be done to maintain the safe, smooth and efficient operation of a subway system that runs around the clock, seven days a week. However, by suspending service along line segments, workers can work on and near the tracks without having to interrupt that work every few minutes while a train moves through the area,” said NYC Transit President Thomas Prendergast.
Work will proceed along 6.7 route miles of subway, which translates to nearly 20 miles of track.
The next FASTRACK overnight closure will be on the Seventh Avenue 123 line between 34th Street and Atlantic Avenue from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for four consecutive nights beginning Monday, February 13 and ending at 5 a.m. Friday, February 17.
