Monday Was a Mess for B and C Riders. Here’s What Crews Found Under the Tracks.

Trains are moving normally again after a repair job that turned Monday into a slog for anyone trying to get downtown from the Upper West Side. It took nearly 100 workers and an around-the-clock shift to get there, and it started with something crews weren’t expecting to find.

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The work happened at the 81st Street–Museum of Natural History station, where crews found cracks underneath the trackbed during a scheduled weekend track replacement. The trackbed is the layer of support the rails sit on, and it has to stay stable under trains that weigh hundreds of tons, so the cracks meant the area needed shoring, meaning temporary structural support, before anything could run over it normally again. Those workers stayed on the job from Sunday into Monday evening, according to the MTA, filling the affected area with ballast, the crushed stone that holds track in place and drains water away from it, and laying 300 feet of new track.

For riders, that meant no downtown local service between 125th Street and 59th Street–Columbus Circle for most of Monday. Downtown B and C trains ran express through the Upper West Side, blowing past every local stop. The B was pulled out of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx entirely and rerouted onto the M and then the Q, terminating at 96th Street on the Upper East Side, amNewYork reported. A and D trains ran with delays. The agency told anyone who normally takes those lines in Manhattan to use the 1, 2 or 3 and leave extra time.

The MTA said earlier Monday that it was hoping to have everything back by Tuesday’s morning rush. Full service returned just after 8 p.m. Monday, NBC New York reported, well ahead of that.

The MTA has since said the job isn’t done. In a newsletter to riders, the agency said crews had demolished 300 feet of concrete beneath the rails before the cracks turned up underneath, and that more than 100 workers packed the area with ballast around the clock until the rails were secure. A test train ran before service resumed Monday night. Another outage is planned for next weekend so crews can pour the new concrete track bed, and the agency said it has people working on a permanent solution. The MTA acknowledged that extending an outage is disruptive but said running trains over a compromised surface wasn’t an option, calling the whole thing a reminder that state-of-good-repair work is essential.

For now, the trains are running. Riders can check mta.info/alerts or the MTA app for service updates.

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