By Joseph Morales

                 The Staten Island Railway(SIR) is the sole passenger rail line in Staten Island. It runs from from the southwestern tip of Staten Island at the Tottenville station northeast to the St. George Ferry Terminal in the St. George section of the borough. According to the American Public Transportation Administration, almost 2.8 million people rode the Staten Island Railway in 2021. The MTA recently completed the construction of a brand new Clifton Maintenance Shop, which replaces the old one as the sole maintenance shop for SIR trains. This new shop will help the MTA better service on the rail line as well as keep protect the shop from numerous environmental threats.

                The SIR always had a single maintenance shop known as the Clifton Maintenance Shop near the Clifton SIR station, where maintenance to all SIR train cars occurs when necessary.  The shop had always been incapable of numerous repair jobs. Since the Staten Island Railway is not connected to the broader NYC Subway System or the mainline U.S. rail network, any trains that needed work that the Clifton Maintenance Shop cannot perform must be sent to the Coney Island Yard in Brooklyn via truck to get the work done. MTA General Superintendent Of Car Equipment for the Department of Subways, Scott Ganzenmuller told the Staten Island Advance that should this have to happen it could be a week between when a train is sent to Brooklyn and when it returns to Staten Island. 

                  Now Ganzenmuller says that a train can be taken out of service during the morning peak, be repaired in a matter of hours and then be returned to service in the evening peak, which is a substantial upgrade. 

                  As important as this is, the new Clifton Maintenance Shop is more than just an efficiency upgrade for the repair of trains. The facility was also renovated to be able to withstand water intrusion, cope with an additional three feet of storm surge as well as a Category 2 hurricane. These aspects of the project are critical as the facility dealt with extensive damage after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The damages to the maintenance shop were part of the reason why service was reduced along the rail line for 16 weeks following one of the most devastating hurricanes in New York City history.  Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane upon entering New York.

Other aspects of the new maintenance shop included the installing communication systems such as CCTV and fire alarms, other environmental improvements such as asbestos abatement, the demolition and discarding of underground diesel storage as well as the rearrangement of switches and tracks.

                   Making New York’s transit infrastructure climate resilient has been one of the MTA’s priorities ever since Sandy as they have also upgraded train yards, bus depots, subway tunnels and more in order to protect the system from any future major storms. They have also upgraded other facilities near waterways as they are more prone to flooding. These include the Michael J. Quill Bus Depot in Midtown Manhattan, the Coney Island Subway Yard in Brooklyn and the LIRR Long Island City Yard in Long Island City, Queens. The MTA hopes to continue this historic rate of progress toward making the New York region’s transit infrastructure more environmentally sustainable. 

Works Cited

Bascome, Erik. “MTA opens new hurricane-resilient Staten Island Railway maintenance shop in Clifton.” SILive.com, 7 December 2022, https://www.silive.com/news/2022/12/mta-opens-new-hurricane-resilient-staten-island-railway-maintenance-shop-in-clifton.html. Accessed 23 December 2022.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Protecting the MTA Network from Climate Change.” MTA, 2022, https://new.mta.info/climate/completed-resiliency-projects. Accessed 23 December 2022.