Question: How many stations does the Long Island Rail Road stop at?

List of Long Island Rail Road stations



The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is a commuter railway system serving all four counties of Long Island, with one station in the Manhattan borough of New York City in the U.S. state of New York. Its operator is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York. Serving 301,763 passengers per day as of 2007[1] and 88.5 million riders for the year of 2008,[2] it is the busiest commuter railroad in the United States. With 324 passenger route-miles,[3] it spans Long Island from Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn to Montauk station at the tip of the southern fork. Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan is the actual westernmost station of the Long Island Rail Road and its busiest station. 

The system currently has 124 stations on eleven rail lines called "branches".[1] (Not included in this count are two additional stations that serve employees of the LIRR: Hillside Facility and Boland's Landing). Two stations are open seasonally: Belmont Park and Mets–Willets Point; in addition, the Pinelawn station exclusively serves cemeteries in its area and is thus served during daytime hours. Hunterspoint Avenue and Long Island City are open only on weekdays. The six stations on the Main Line east of Ronkonkoma get a few weekday-only trains. Jamaica is a major transfer station between branches, as it provides the interchange from the eastern Long Island stations to the western New York terminals and vice versa. Other inter-branch transfer stations include Woodside, Mineola, Hicksville, Valley Stream, Lynbrook and Babylon. The Huntington, Ronkonkoma and Babylon stations provide transfers between electric train service and diesel train service within their respective branches, the Port Jefferson, Ronkonkoma/Greenport and Babylon/Montauk branches.
Lines
Jamaica and the two employees-only stations are not included in the station counts below. 

Station types

The Long Island Rail Road has three types of stations. Most stations are about "10–12 car lengths" which means that they can fit 10–12 M3, M7 cars (the electric trains that are primarily used), but several are shorter.
There are 4 main types of station construction:
Underground stations completely enclosed beneath buildings or the street (only Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal)
Stations at ground level (most common)
Stations above ground level (less common, used on the entire Babylon Branch)
Open-cut stations below ground level, but open to the sky.  (Only a few stations on the Port Washington Branch use this type of construction).
Historical preservation of stations
Five LIRR stations are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Sea Cliff, Oyster Bay, Farmingdale, Greenport and East Hampton. St. James and Southampton stations are contributing property to historic districts on the NRHP. Other stations that aren't on the list are often cherished by local communities and treated as landmarks, such as Islip, Northport, Glen Street, and Great Neck. Roslyn, Glen Cove, and Locust Valley are other stations on the Oyster Bay Branch that are historic. Efforts to save the original East Williston station house in 2004 proved to be disappointing when the structure was found to be too unstable, while the demolition of Amagansett's in 1965 brought public outcry throughout the Hamptons as well as among local railfans that has lasted for decades.
The St. James station house, built in 1873, is the oldest such building constructed by the LIRR that remains standing. Hewlett's station house is older, but it was originally built by the South Side Railroad of Long Island in 1870. On the West Hempstead Branch, Malverne's station house is the only one originally built during the first two decades of the 20th Century, although it is not recognized as a historic landmark. The elaborate Forest Hills station house was one of the few to avoid modernization during the mid-to-late 20th Century and has retained the original grand decorative construction. When the Babylon Branch was elevated in the post-WW II era, former station houses in Wantagh and Lindenhurst were moved away from the tracks. The former Wantagh station was transformed into a museum, and also listed on the NRHP.
List of stations
This list contains all stations currently open on the Long Island Rail Road (including seasonal-use stations). Many stations are listed on two "branches"—e.g. Merrick is shown as "Montauk Branch (Babylon Branch)". This means Merrick is actually on the stretch of railroad called the Montauk Branch but the trains stopping there are shown in the Babylon Branch public timetable. Similarly, Queens Village is on the Main Line but trains that stop there are en route to/from the Hempstead Branch and appear in that public timetable.


Disused and former stations
These stations are either demolished or existing but not currently in use by the Long Island Rail Road. Several stations of the Rockaway Beach Branch and Far Rockaway Branch were taken over by the New York City Subway as the IND Rockaway Line in 1956.



Further reading
Vincent F. Seyfried, The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part One: South Side R.R. of L.I., © 1961
Vincent F. Seyfried, The Long Island Rail Road: A Comprehensive History, Part Two: The Flushing, North Shore & Central Railroad, © 1963