The West Hempstead Branch is an electrified rail line owned and operated by the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) in the U.S. state of New York. It runs between Valley Stream, New York, and West Hempstead, New York. Route description The branch separates from the Montauk Branch just east of Valley Stream, and runs northeast to West Hempstead. The line has one track between Westwood station and Hempstead Gardens and two from there to the end of the line in West Hempstead, the southbound or east track being a siding. The right-of-way of the West Hempstead Branch is wide enough for two tracks for its whole length. There are three grade-crossings on the line, reducing the maximum speed to , and because of curves at the Lakeview and Malverne stations, the speed is lowered to on that stretch. The branch had one manual block from "HC" to "VA" until "WM" block limit was installed in 1935. Modernization As the smallest LIRR commuter branch, the West Hempstead Branch was one of the last in the system to modernize. It was the last of the electrified LIRR branches to receive high level platforms, in the early 1970s, and the last of the electrified branches to be fitted with Automatic Train Control (known as Automatic Speed Control by the LIRR), which it received in October 2009 during a system overhaul and upgrade at Valley Interlocking. The branch has the lowest ridership of any on the Long Island Rail Road. Subsequently, the branch is one of the LIRR lines most vulnerable to closure, and has been threatened with abandonment in recent years. From September 2010 until November 22, 2014, the line had no weekend service due to budgetary constraints, with St. Albans served by Babylon Branch trains on weekends. History The West Hempstead Branch was the indirect successor to the old South Side Railroad's Southern Hempstead Branch, which ran a similar route north from Valley Stream to Hempstead, before being torn up in the 1880s. On January 26, 1892, the New York Bay Extension Railroad Company was incorporated as a subsidiary of the Long Island Rail Road to build a line running from Garden City to a point in the town of New Lots in Kings County near the intersection with the New York, Brooklyn & Manhattan Beach Railway Company. The line was built between Country Life Press to Valley Stream and opened in