Riders navigate the first weekday of a strike that has shut down the largest US commuter rail system

NEW YORK (AP) — Commuters in New York City’s suburbs navigated a gauntlet of car, bus and subway routes to get to work Monday after a strike on the Long Island Rail Road that shut down the nation’s busiest commuter rail system entered its third day.

Unions representing rail workers and the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which runs the railroad, negotiated for much of Sunday, wrapping their talks around 1 a.m., but failed to reach an agreement, despite pressure from the National Mediation Board and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. A spokesperson for union workers said negotiators returned to the bargaining table early Monday.

Katie Dolgow, who teaches first graders in Manhattan, said it had already taken her an hour just to travel from Long Island to Queens as more commuters turned to the region's already notoriously gridlocked roads. But her big concern was coming home.

“I have to get my son at daycare by 5:30. It's going to take me longer getting home. I'm a teacher, I'm going to have leave work at 1:30,” she said.

Picketers were out early.

“We're just asking for a reasonable cost of living adjustment on our wages,” Byron Lee, a locomotive engineer, said outside Penn Station in midtown Manhattan. “People think that you don't deserve it.”

The LIRR serves hundreds of thousands of commuters who live along a 118-mile-long (190-kilometer-long) land mass that includes Brooklyn and Queens in New York City and the Hamptons, a summertime playground for the rich and famous near its eastern tip. The railroad has long provided commuters relief from its rush-hour clogged highways.

Most of its riders live outside New York City in two counties populated by nearly three million people.

The railroad closed down and workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m. Saturday after five unions representing about half its workforce walked off the job for the first time in three decades.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the Transportation Communications Union said in a statement Sunday that workers “are not asking for special treatment — they are simply fighting to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living in the New York region after years without a raise.”

The unions and the MTA have been negotiating a new contract since 2023, but talks have stalled over salaries and healthcare. The Trump administration got involved in September after unions asked for the appointment of a panel of experts, but they still couldn't reach a deal.

At a news conference Sunday, Hochul said workers would lose every dollar they would gain with a new contract by remaining on strike for three days.

MTA Chairman Janno Lieber also urged a fast resolution.

“We are headed in a positive direction but we have to get it finished,” Lieber told WABC-TV.

The first to be affected by the walkout — the LIRR's first since a two-day strike in 1994 — were the many sports fans who wanted to see the Yankees and Mets battle or the Knicks’ playoff run at Madison Square Garden, which is located directly above the railroad’s Penn Station hub in Manhattan.

Federal law makes it extremely difficult for rail workers to walk out and even allows Congress to block a strike, but lawmakers have not intervened as they did with the nation's freight railroads in 2022.

Would-be commuters were greeted by train departure boards that listed ghost trains marked “No Passengers” rather than upcoming trains listed by destination.

Essential workers among the roughly 250,000 weekday LIRR riders took buses into the city from six locations on Long Island starting at 4 a.m. Monday. The evening rush-hour commute runs from around 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Hochul, a Democrat, has blamed the Trump administration for cutting mediation short in September and pushing the unions toward a strike. Trump, a Republican, said on his Truth Social platform that he had nothing to do with it.

“No, Kathy, it’s your fault, and now looking over the facts, you should not have allowed this to happen,” Trump said.

Hochul urged companies and agencies that employ workers from Long Island to let them work from home whenever possible.

“It’s impossible to fully replace LIRR service. So effective Monday, I’m asking that regular commuters who can work from home, should. Please do so,” she said.

The MTA has said the unions’ initial demands to raise salaries would result in large fare increases and be disproportionate to other unionized workers' pay.

McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire. Associated Press writers Ted Shaffrey and Joseph Frederick in New York; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed.

A pedestrian walks along an empty track at Mineola train station as Long Island Rail Road workers strike, Monday, May 18, 2026, in Mineola, N.Y. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Tracks are empty at Mineola train station as Long Island Rail Road workers enter the third day of their strike, Monday, May 18, 2026, in Mineola, N.Y. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

People exit and board buses at the Mineola train station as Long Island Rail Road workers enter the third day of their strike, Monday, May 18, 2026, in Mineola, N.Y. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Commuters sit on a shuttle bus as Long Island Rail Road workers strike, Monday, May 18, 2026, in Mineola, N.Y. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Visitors look out at the trains at the West Side Yard from the Vessel on the first day of a Long Island Rail Road workers' strike, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Tracks are empty at Mineola train station as Long Island Rail Road workers enter the third day of their strike, Monday, May 18, 2026, in Mineola, N.Y. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

ACWORTH, Ga. (AP) — Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, who wants to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November, happily calls himself a warrior for President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement.

Although it's a sensible calling card for anyone vying for a Republican nomination these days, even some of his supporters have a few concerns ahead of Tuesday's primary.

Gary Waldrep, a local party committee chairman, asked Collins at a recent campaign stop how he was going to win over at least a few of the “middle-of-the-road” voters who may have been turned off by Trump.

The question reflected Republican anxiety about the party's chances in Georgia, where Democrats have demonstrated strength in recent U.S. Senate elections and Ossoff is no longer considered as easy of a target as he once was.

“I watch the polls just like everybody else,” Waldrep said. “I know it’s going to be close.”

Collins is competing for the Republican nomination with Rep. Buddy Carter and Derek Dooley, a lawyer and former college football coach who is backed by outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump has not endorsed a candidate, raising the likelihood of a June 16 runoff that would burn more time and money before the party can focus on defeating Ossoff.

If Ossoff loses, Democrats have almost no chance of winning a Senate majority. He's the only senator from his party running for reelection in a state that Trump won two years ago.

Trump carried Georgia in two out of his three campaigns. Republicans control the Atlanta statehouse. But in the last six years, Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock have won a combined three Senate contests, each time defeating a Republican who pledged fealty to Trump.

For this year's campaign, Kemp rebuffed Senate Republican leaders' encouragement to challenge Ossoff and declined to endorse either Collins or Carter. Instead, he recruited Dooley, a childhood family friend who is the son of legendary coach Vince Dooley, and tried to convince Georgia Republicans to take a chance on the first-time candidate.

“My goal is here is to win our Senate seat back,” Kemp said Friday as he introduced Dooley at a gun store in Douglasville. “We need a political outsider to do that.”

Dooley, 57, said in a recent interview that there are few if any policy differences among the candidates, “and so electability is everything.” And in his television advertising, he attempts to split the difference between Trump's base and the broader electorate.

“I’m gonna work with President Trump, but for you,” he tells voters in one spot.

Collins, 58, is a two-term House member who owns a trucking company and boasts of a “grassroots operation out there pounding the pavement across this state.”

The second-term House member has the advantage of representing a district east of Atlanta, putting him in the media market of the state’s population center. And he sponsored the Lakin Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student killed by a man who was also charged for being in the U.S. illegally. The law, signed by Trump last year, requires that immigrants accused of a range of crimes be held without bond.

“I have proven that I can deliver for the state of Georgia,” Collins said in Acworth. “I can even do it with bipartisan legislation. And I never compromise my conservative values.”

Collins also has a brash social media presence has both boosted his identity as a firebrand in Trump's mold and drawn criticism. Among his most controversial posts was sharing a video in 2024 of University of Mississippi students, nearly all of them white males, taunting a Black woman.

“Ole Miss taking care of business,” Collins wrote.

Carter is in his sixth term but represents a Savannah-based district, a less populous corner of Georgia that's rarely a launching pad for statewide campaigns. He's pulled back on advertising in the closing weeks before the primary, suggesting that he's lacking adequate financial support.

The 68-year-old pharmacist has targeted a House ethics investigation into whether Collins abused taxpayer funds by hiring the girlfriend of his former chief of staff — now his campaign adviser — for work that the woman allegedly did not perform.

“If taxpayers can’t trust you to properly steward their money, how can they trust you to be a U.S. senator?” Carter asked Collins in a recent debate.

“Buddy,” Collins shot back, “I can tell through the voice that you know how the polling is going out there.”

Dooley, meanwhile, is attempting to vault over his more experienced competitors.

“I come from a whole different world than they come from,” he said. “Both of those guys represent everything that I’m running against. I want to change how Washington does its business, and I want people up there for the right reasons.”

Kemp ran through a list of first-term Republican senators who did not hold elected office before, including Ohio's Bernie Moreno, Montana's Tim Sheehy and Pennsylvania's Dave McCormick.

“If you look around the country where Republicans have been successful beating Democratic incumbents, it has been political outsiders that have been victorious,” Kemp said.

The point, Dooley said, is that “you've got to have somebody that's going to stay on offense" without having a record to defend.

“It comes down to who can beat Jon Ossoff,” he said.

Barrow reported from Douglasville and Atlanta.

Gov. Brian Kemp speaks during a campaign stop for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Derek Dooley at Farmview Market in Madison, Ga., on May 8, 2026. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)