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by Jose Martinez, THE CITY
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As would-be Long Island Rail Road riders scrambled to make it out of Manhattan just after midnight Saturday, MTA police officers waited to deliver bad news at the bottom of the towering escalators inside Grand Central Madison.
Close to 3,500 workers on the country’s largest commuter railroad went out on strike at 12:01 a.m. — and those hoping to catch a train home from its sprawling East Midtown hub were now out of luck.
“Guys, no more trains,” one officer said. “You’re going to have to take the subway or an Uber, my friend.”
Henry Matuet, a general manager at two Midtown restaurants, slumped against a shuttered cupcake kiosk inside the terminal’s desolate concourse before the next leg of his extended trip home to Huntington, in Suffolk County. He said he had been at work since 10:30 a.m. Friday.
“I want to finish this first,” Matuet, 48, said while pointing to a bottle of Bud Light. “Then I’m going to Flushing on the 7 train, and my wife is going to pick me up there — not cool, you know?”
While the MTA had warned commuters for weeks about the increasingly real threat of a strike, the message evidently did not sink in for some riders until it was too late.
“I should probably take a cab at this time, but it’s going to be expensive,” said Rafael Antunes, 37, who was trying to get back to Bayside. “And I have to be at school at 8 a.m.”
Matuet and Antunes were among the earliest of the close to 300,000 LIRR riders now caught in the midst of a labor battle.
The fight over wages between the MTA and five unions — including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — has led to the first strike on the LIRR since 1994.
That walkout ended after two days, but union leaders talked tough about how long the latest walkout might last, adding that no further contract talks are scheduled.
“This is an open-ended strike,” said Gilman Lang, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen. “We don’t know when it will end. It shouldn’t have begun.”
Janno Lieber, MTA chairperson and chief executive, countered that “it’s become apparent that these unions always intended to strike.”
“Their strategy is to inconvenience Long Islanders and try to force the MTA and the state to do a bad deal,” he said. “That is unacceptable to Governor Hochul, to the MTA board and to me, so here we are.”
After rushing through Grand Central Madison in hopes of catching an LIRR train to his job at a clinic in Jamaica just before the 12:01 a.m. strike deadline, Emanuel Mieles, 20, weighed his options for an alternate route after arriving too late.
“I’ll have to take the subway out there,” Mieles said at the top of the bank of escalators. “But I’m going to have to tell my boss I’m going to be late.”
Commuter Marty Egan, 28, grudgingly let the reality of a strike sink in minutes after midnight, when he could no longer catch a train to Huntington.
“I was just trying to go home and Grand Central is very, very consistent,” he said. “I thought I could come here and less than 30 minutes later, I would get a ride home.”
Top: Midnight at Grand Central Madison as LIRR workers began a strike, May 16, 2026. Credit: Jose Martinez/THE CITY
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