L train: Andrew Cuomo announces major subway line will not shut down completely in New York

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced that a planned 15-month shutdown of L-train service between Manhattan and Brooklyn will no longer happen.

The train segment — which connects two swathes of the city — was scheduled to shut down on 27 April so that workers could fix the 7,100-foot Canarsie tunnel that connects the two boroughs under the East River.

That portion of the train line was damaged during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and a shutdown would have impacted nearly 250,000 commuters.

Mr Cuomo, announcing the new plan, said experts had proposed a new design that would allow the tunnel to stay open during the repairs.

“It uses many new innovations that are new, frankly, to the rail industry in this country,” Mr Cuomo said. “With this design, it will not be necessary to close the L train at all, which would be a phenomenal benefit to the people of New York City."

The reversal of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) directives comes after more than two years in which officials repeatedly said that there was no way to avoid shutting down the tunnel for the repairs.

The new system to repair the tunnel has traditionally been used for bridge repairs, and the efforts in the tunnel will be the first time these methods are used to repair a tunnel in the US.

The new method will allow the MTA to hang cables using a “racking system” on the side of the tunnel walls, instead of pulling out the bench wall that contains cables damaged by the 2012 storm.

The “racking system” would include cables wrapped in protective fibreglass materials and sensors that will notify workers if the rack moves.

The old corroded cables in the bench wall will not be removed at all.

But the governor has promised residents of the city that the structural integrity of the tunnel was not impacted by Superstorm Sandy, and that they should not worry about the integrity of the tunnel.