L Train Will Go Back To Normal For The Holidays, MTA Says

L TRAIN CORRIDOR, NYC — Consider it a Christmas gift from the MTA.

Transit officials announced this week that they will take a break from repairing the L train during the holidays, returning the slowed subway line to its normal schedule over Christmas and New Year's.

The L, which has been running every 20 minutes nights and weekends, will go back to its normal schedule starting 5 a.m. on Christmas Eve until 10 p.m. on Dec. 26 and from 5 a.m. New Year's Eve to 10 p.m. on Jan. 2, the MTA said in the L project newsletter. The L will run on a normal Sunday schedule during Christmas Day and New Year's Day, officials said.

The changes will be most helpful on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day nights, when the L would normally start to ramp down from its typical five minutes between trains around 8 p.m.

Trains will instead keep running every five minutes until 1:30 a.m., when, even before the L train repairs, they run every 20 minutes until 5:30 a.m.

The holiday schedule also means that the M train, which was extended during the L train repairs, will run its normal route instead of running all the way to 96th Street and Second Avenue. The normal route runs from Metropolitan Avenue to Delancey-Essex Streets.

The normal schedule during the holidays comes before some extra service interruptions coming to the L in January.

Just like it did for a few weeks this fall, the L will stop running to the majority of Brooklyn stops every weekend in January.

These changes are part of extra repairs the MTA is making to stations along the subway line.

They will mean the L won't run between Lorimer Street station and Broadway Junction station from 11:30 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday each January weekend.

Upgrades are specifically coming to four stations between Lorimer and Broadway Junction, including Morgan Avenue, Dekalb Avenue, Halsey Street and the Bushwick Avenue-Aberdeen Street stations. The MTA said they plan to fully replace all of the platform edges on both sides of the track, install accessible boarding areas, repair steel beams and columns and paint the platform areas.

The L train repairs were previously expected to shutter the line between Manhattan and Brooklyn completely for 15 months until a team of experts commissioned by Gov. Andrew Cuomo came up with a different way of doing the repairs.

The MTA says L train service has been "maintained as normal" on weekdays for 88 percent of weekday straphangers under the new plan.