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If you’ve ever looked around your LIRR train car and thought, “This belongs in a museum”—good news. The MTA is finally trading up.
Last week, the agency approved a $2.3 billion purchase of 316 brand-new commuter railcars: 160 destined for the Long Island Rail Road, 156 headed to Metro-North. And while the timeline for delivery stretches to 2032, the order marks a major step toward modernizing a fleet that, in some cases, dates back to the Reagan era.
That’s right: Some of the clunky, steel beasts still trundling through Queens and Nassau County were brought out of retirement just to cover service gaps when Grand Central Madison finally opened in 2023. But relief is on the horizon—albeit a distant one.
Dubbed M-9As, the new cars will feature upgrades both practical and posh: USB charging ports, glass windows, accessibility improvements like automatic bathroom doors and a design based on current reliable models. They’ll be built by Alstom in upstate New York, bringing hundreds of jobs with them and hopefully shaving off the kinds of delays that have plagued MTA capital projects for decades.
“New Yorkers deserve a fast, reliable and comfortable transit system,” said Governor Kathy Hochul, who announced the approval alongside MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber. “This is how we continue to achieve record on-time performance.”
That system has been a long time coming. The Grand Central Madison project, which began back in 1969 as part of a broader dream to unify the city’s disparate transit systems, opened almost 50 years behind schedule and ran up a tab of $12.7 billion. Among its many hiccups? Not having enough modern trains to actually use the tunnel once it opened.
Now, the MTA is aiming to avoid history repeating itself. Lieber says this new order kicks off a $10.9 billion plan to purchase nearly 2,000 new railcars in total. If all goes to plan, pilot M-9As will roll onto the LIRR tracks in 2030, meaning they’ll debut a mere 61 years after the original vision for East Side Access.
The future is coming—just like your train, eventually.