Sexting while taking tickets on the Long Island Rail Road, threatening to “knock out” a fellow worker and using a video-game player while driving a train were just a few of the infractions committed by nearly 900 of the railroad’s workers in the last five years.
A total of 884 workers were suspended and 12 were fired from 2009 through mid-2013, according to records obtained by The Post through a Freedom of Information Law request.
The disregard for railroad rules ranged from the minor — a maintenance man 45 minutes late to clean a train — to the potentially deadly, when engineer Ronald Cabrera let a passenger drive a train for 20 miles. Cabrera was fired in 2009.
Safety concerns on the region’s railroads were heightened last month after a Metro-North train derailed in The Bronx, killing four passengers. And one car of a freight train derailed Friday near Brentwood causing delays on the LIRR, which serves an average of 285,000 passengers on weekdays.
No one was injured, but there were multiple delays after LIRR engineer Carrigan Diaz passed a stop signal in the Atlantic Terminal in July 2010 and ran the train over the wrong switch, causing the train to derail. As of November 2013, no punishment had been meted out.
Monica Hunter, a supervisor at the Jamaica station, was riding on the LIRR gravy train — collecting a whopping $155,000 in overtime plus a $79,000 salary in 2009 — until she got in the face of another worker.
When the worker told her to move away, according to the report on the 2010 incident, Hunter unleashed a stream of obscenities, accusing her colleague of “f—ing married men” and calling her a “retard.” She added, “We can take it to the street.”
Hunter, who was also accused of letting workers go early without approval, was suspended for 180 days.
Charles Roebuck, an assistant station master at Penn Station, was fired after he threatened to “knock out” another employee.
Conductor Alan Dagrossa used his LIRR cellphone to send “picture messages that were pornographic and lewd” and received numerous “picture/video messages that were sexually and racially charged,” according to railroad documents. He was suspended for 60 days.
Engineer C. Martinez was caught using a video-game device in the train’s cab where it was visible on the console. He was suspended for 30 days.
“The Long Island Rail Road, like any large employer, is going to have some small number of people who do stupid things on the job,” said Adam Lisberg, an MTA spokesman.