MTA Construction & Development opened bids May 22, 2024, on the new Yaphank station — solicitation 0000451919, a ground-up replacement for one of the Long Island Rail Road's oldest stops. Fourteen bidders showed up. Pioneer Landscaping & Asphalt Paving Inc. was the apparent low at $9,694,860.
The tab ran wide. LoDuca Associates Inc. sat second at $11,352,064 — 17.1 percent above the low, which is real daylight. Then the field bunched hard: the GalvinBros/Madhue Contracting joint venture at $14,503,241, FOS Development Corp. at $14,586,576, Bove Industries at $14,700,825, Gramercy Group at $14,859,300 and Grace Industries at $14,982,800 — five firms reading the job almost identically in the mid-$14 millions. From there the numbers climbed all the way to Litehouse Builders Inc. at $46,933,650. Fourteen bidders means the job drew a real crowd; a low bid sitting that far under the pack is the number the MTA's reviewers will spend their time on.
What Pioneer priced is a station built from the dirt up. The state's own project description spells it out: a platform sized for two train cars with ramp access, a 50-car parking lot with a bus loop built into it, a plaza with an information totem and bike racks, a Help Point intercom on the platform, and full ADA accessibility throughout. The first work out of the ground was grading and utilities — sitework before anything vertical. The new site sits farther east than the old stop, close to William Floyd Parkway and the Long Island Expressway.
The bid documents split the work in a way that matters to whoever prices this: MTA's own Long Island Rail Road crews handle the track tie-in, the communications fiber and the platform paging system, the CCTV cameras, the Help Point kiosk — wired straight to LIRR's own security command center — and the badge readers on both staff stairways. Everything else is the general contractor's: the parking lot, the platform structure and shelter, a modular retaining wall, the site utilities, the landscaping, and tearing out the old station. Pioneer also had to clear a 20 percent self-perform floor on its own crews — cut down from an original 35 percent after a bidder told the MTA a job this trade-heavy doesn't leave much work for a GC to do with its own forces.
Getting to that May 22 bid opening took longer than the schedule MTA C&D started with. The original bid due date was January 31, 2024. The agency pushed it back four separate times over the next three and a half months — to March 18, then March 25, then April 30, and finally May 22 — with the anticipated award sliding from June to August along the way. Somewhere in that stretch the scope moved too: a 3D-model coordination requirement got added mid-bid, along with a new ballast specification and a requirement that the contractor shoot monthly time-lapse video of the job for its full length. None of that shows up on a bid-results tab. It's the kind of scope creep that eats into a bid the longer a solicitation stays open.
The site work happens next to live track, and the documents spell out what that costs in schedule. Any excavation within roughly two feet horizontal for every one foot vertical of a live rail line needs MTA sign-off and two weeks' notice; anything closer needs a full track outage. The contractor gets 80 flagger days from the Railroad at no charge — a number the agency set after a bidder flagged how much of the retaining-wall, ADA-ramp and utility work sits within 25 feet of the tracks. Drones are mandatory on this job, not optional, for aerial documentation, which is why Aviation Liability coverage is on the insurance schedule. Any sub bidding into a Force Account split like this one should build the Railroad's coordination windows into a schedule before award, not after.
The reason this station exists is Brookhaven National Laboratory. The lab employs about 2,500 people and draws more than 5,000 visitors a year — scientists, students, collaborators — and the old Yaphank stop, in service since 1844, sat too far away to be much use to any of them. Moving the station east puts the train within reach of the lab and the industrial-park jobs around the new site, with service on the Ronkonkoma Branch running toward Greenport one way and Ronkonkoma the other.
The standing caveat applies: an apparent low is a reading, not a ribbon. The bids went under review the day they were opened — responsiveness, responsibility, the math behind the number — and nothing on this tab is a contract until MTA Construction & Development says it is.
The project behind those bids is real now. Ground broke April 3, 2025, on what Albany billed as a $20 million project, and the station — named Yaphank-BNL — opened Saturday, July 18, 2026, with the first train out at 5:36 a.m. toward Greenport. The state calls it the first new LIRR station since Elmont-UBS in 2021, and only the second new station in fifty years. The contract itself gave the winning bidder up to 710 calendar days — about 23 months — from notice to proceed to reach substantial completion, with an $8,515-a-day swing tied to whichever completion date a bidder committed to. Ground-to-opening ran about 15 months — comfortably inside that ceiling, not a stretch beyond it.