Floral Park man on a quest to visit all 126 LIRR stations

Like tens of thousands of Long Islanders do each day, Rick Guidal boarded an LIRR train at his home station on a recent Friday morning, bound for one of the railroad’s 126 stations.

But unlike most commuters, the Long Island Rail Road system wasn’t just a means of getting to his final destination. It was Guidal’s final destination.

“Certain towns that I’ve never visited, I’d like to see,” said Guidal, 69, of Floral Park. “But my goal is the train stations themselves.”

After stepping off the train at St. James, Guidal went through his usual routine: taking a selfie with the station sign, checking out historical artifacts — including a 19th-century potbelly stove — inside the station waiting room, and trying to get a flavor of the surrounding community. Then, he pulled some papers from his backpack, and a yellow highlighter.

“Station number 107,” Guidal said, as he crossed out “St. James” on a printed list of all the LIRR’s stations. “It’s now official.”

More than 100 so far

Guidal, a part-time bartender and bird sanctuary worker, is on a mission to visit every LIRR station there is, and he has already made considerable progress, as evidenced from all the yellow on his printed list. As of the writing of this story, Guidal had made it to 110 of the LIRR’s 126 stations, most recently crossing Deer Park and Brentwood off his list.

It’s a quest sparked by happenstance. While walking through his Floral Park neighborhood a few years ago, Guidal noticed a Realtor’s office with several mock LIRR station signs bearing the names of communities across Long Island.

“I went in to look and count how many I had been to. I said, ‘I’ve been to that. I’ve been to that,’ ” recalled Guidal. “That put me in the mindset of, ‘I should just look to see how many railroad stations there are, and how many I’ve done.’ ”

A self-described “completist who doesn’t complete anything,” Guidal had taken on some ambitious challenges before, including visiting all 50 states (“I’ve been stuck at 39 for a long time, and I’m running out of time and money”) and all Major League Baseball stadiums (“There’s still five that I need, because they keep tearing down old stadiums and building new ones”). Guidal said he even once tried to visit every bar in Zagat’s New York City Nightlife Guide, but gave up somewhere in the 400s, around a third of the way in.

But Guidal already had a head start in his latest challenge. He grew up near the Broadway station in Flushing, Queens, and rode on the Port Washington branch regularly as a kid. Later, he was a daily LIRR commuter for nearly 30 years while working as a government bond broker in Manhattan’s financial district. And, like many Long Islanders, weekend train rides to and from the Hamptons have been a regular summer highlight. Guidal had crossed about 30 stations off the list without even trying.

“It’s an attainable goal,” he said. “I can do this. And I’m going to do it.”

‘So Much History’

Greeting Guidal at station number 107 was the perfect tour guide, railroad historian David D. Morrison who has written a dozen books about LIRR stations. And as a former LIRR branch line manager, whose job it was to check in on stations each day, Morrison can also lay claim to having visited all but one LIRR stop, the newly built Elmont/UBS Arena station.

Still, even if Guidal does visit every LIRR station, it’s unlikely he’ll see as many as Morrison has. The Plainview resident noted that there were once more than 200 LIRR stations, but many have closed over the railroad’s 186-year history. In the late 1990s alone, the railroad shuttered a dozen stations with low ridership, including Mill Neck and Southampton College.

Morrison also had access to two LIRR stations still in service, but off-limits to Guidal: employee facilities at Hillside and Morris Park in Queens. Still, Morrison said he’s unaware of any non-LIRR employee having visited every passenger station in the system, as Guidal is intent on doing.

“My goodness, I’ve never heard of an individual like this before,” Morrison said. “Rick might look at it as a journey to visit railroad stations. I look at it as him taking a journey through historical places. There’s so much history on this railroad. . . . I like to say that the trains were created to give purpose to the stations.”

Guidal’s undertaking is also appreciated by another veteran railroader, Long Island Rail Road president Robert Free, whose first job at the LIRR, 33 years ago, was as a “station appearance maintainer,” as the LIRR calls them. Free has not only visited all of the LIRR’s stations, “I cleaned most of the stations,” he said.

“This warms my heart,” Free said. “It brings attention to the LIRR’s stations, which are the heart of the communities the railroad serves.”

Free said Guidal’s mission also speaks to the changing face of railroad travel on Long Island, where “reverse commuting” — people traveling to destinations on Long Island from New York City — and off-peak and weekend ridership have exploded in recent years. “I love what he’s doing,” Free said.

Sunday outings

Guidal has been steadily chipping away at his goal, having visited more than 70 stations over the past three years. He sometimes goes it alone, and has other times been accompanied by his wife.

“Generally, we do it on a Sunday,” Guidal said. “I’ll just say to my wife, Kathy, ‘Do you want to take a railroad journey?’”

Kathy Guidal said she’s “typically up for it,” both because she cherishes the time spent with her husband, and because it’s allowed her to see “parts of Long Island that I never” would have. She recalled taking a long walk from the LIRR’s Port Jefferson station to the village’s downtown area, along the way getting an intimate view of the community she would have missed if she visited by car.

“It definitely does force you to see the towns in a way you wouldn’t see them,” she said.

Beyond just checking out the stations, the Guidals try to take in some local culture at every stop on their trail, including museums, churches, libraries and restaurants. The 100th station visited by Guidal earlier this year, Pinelawn, carried special significance for his wife, as it was also her first time visiting her parents’ graves at nearby Long Island National Cemetery.

“I’ve loved it,” Kathy Guidal said of her Sunday afternoon railroad rendezvous with her husband.

Although he appreciates some of the busier railroad hubs, like Grand Central Madison, Hicksville and Huntington — with their art installations and plentiful amenities — Guidal said his favorite stations to visit are the more remote, “rustic” ones. They include Mattituck, which is “out in the middle of nowhere, basically” without so much as a ticket machine, and Southold, where “you could picture in the 1800s like a mail-order bride getting off the train there for the potato farmers.”

As with his unfulfilled 50-state mission, most of the stations Guidal has yet to visit are the ones hardest to get to, including those farthest east. The “two holy grails,” Guidal said, are Montauk and Yaphank. The former will likely require an overnight stay, Guidal said. The latter may carry the most urgency of all the remaining un-visited stations, as it’s the only one that may not be standing much longer.

The LIRR plans to demolish its existing Yaphank station upon the opening of a new station, about 3 miles east. The new Yaphank station is set to open sometime next year — raising Guidal’s target to 127.

Rules of play

With the exception of his race to get to Yaphank before it’s torn down, Guidal said he’s in no rush to complete his goal. “I don’t have this plotted out. I don’t have a timeline. When it happens, it happens. . . . It’s about enjoying it,” said Guidal, whose progress is regularly checked by customers at the Floral Park bar where he works.

“People say to me, ‘Well, you can get like 10 in one day right? . . . You just step off of the train and get back on.’ And I say, ‘No, that doesn’t count,’ ” Guidal said earnestly. “Yes, there are rules. There are rules for everything. . . . You can’t step on and step off. You have to utilize the station. That’s the word I use: utilize.”

And so, a station can only be checked off the list if Guidal arrives at it or departs from it by train. That means Guidal is typically limited to two stations per day: the one at which he arrives, and the one from which he departs.

History lessons

After learning from Morrison about the rich history of the 152-year-old St. James station — the oldest LIRR-built railroad station in the system still in existence (Hewlett is older, but was built by the defunct South Side Railroad of Long Island) — Guidal headed one station west, to Smithtown.

“It’s not impressive. . . . It’s just very basic, very boilerplate,” Guidal said, as he traversed the westbound station platform from one end to the other. But for a station waiting room with a few historical photographs, there wasn’t much to see there. Still, Guidal wasn’t disappointed.

“Out of 126 stations, they’re not all going to be Huntingtons and Mineolas and beautiful stations like that. It’s to be expected. And that’s fine with me,” he said. “When you find a nice station with art . . . and things like that, that’s a bonus. I really don’t expect to find too much. I’m happy just to say I utilized the station.”

Seconds before his homeward-bound train pulled into the station, Guidal realized he was on the wrong platform. He hightailed it up the stairs, across the pedestrian bridge and down the other side just before the loud diesel locomotive could pull away.

“Number 108!” Guidal proclaimed before vanishing behind the sliding train door.