NEW YORK — Long Island Rail Road service came to a grinding halt Saturday as some 3,500 workers walked off the job just after midnight over failed contract negotiations with the MTA.

As workers hit the picket lines, LIRR service has been “ suspended until further notice,” the MTA said early Saturday.

“Avoid nonessential travel and work from home if possible,” the MTA said on X. “We will have limited shuttle bus service on weekdays for essential workers and those who cannot telecommute.”

The strike is expected to be a nightmare for the 300,000 commuters who rely on LIRR trains to get them in and out of NYC each day. The contingency plan relies heavily on shuttle buses, but MTA officials admit it will not come close to moving the number of people who rely on the trains.

Striking LIRR workers set up picket lines at Penn Station and Ronkonkoma Station in Suffolk County. Other picket lines were likely to be formed throughout the weekend.

While the full impact of the strike won’t be felt until Monday, city officials predict baseball fans will face travel disruptions on both Saturday and Sunday as they make their way to CitiField for the subway series between the Mets and Yankees.

The Mets have organized shuttle services from several Long Island locations, including Roosevelt Field, to help get fans to the stadium.

Gov. Kathy Hochul called on both sides to return to the bargaining table and hammer out an agreement.

“I believe a deal can be done and I urge both the MTA and these unions to return to the table and bargain non-stop until a deal is reached,” she said in a statement.

LIRR trains still in service at midnight Saturday continued their run to get passengers to their destination. The last scheduled train was a 11:58 p.m. westbound train from West Hempstead to Jamaica.

Then the railroad went silent. It was the first time a strike has stopped the Long Island Rail Road in 32 years, when rail workers walked off the job for two days.

Gilman Lang, General Chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, indicated in a statement early Saturday morning that this strike could stretch longer.

“This is an open-ended strike,” he said “We don’t know when it will end.”

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber stood his ground on Saturday, saying that he authority “cannot responsibly make a deal that implodes MTA’s budget.”

“We refuse to make a deal that pits it on riders and taxpayers to fund outsized wage increases — far beyond what anyone else at the MTA is getting — and for folks who are already the highest-paid railroad workers in the country.”

Lieber said the striking unions “always wanted to strike,” and planned to use frustrated commuters as leverage to get the raises they wanted.

“Their strategy is to inconvenience Long Islanders and try to force the MTA and the state to do a bad deal,” he said.

In her statement, Hochul called the strike “reckless,” saying it would endanger progress made by the railroad.

“These unions represent the highest paid workers of any railroad in the nation, yet they are demanding contracts that could raise fares as much as 8%, pit workers against one another, and risk tax hikes for Long Islanders,” she said.

Lieber said the MTA in its last offer “literally gave them everything they said they wanted in terms of pay but they rejected even that.”

An MTA contingency plan, which will ferry passengers by bus between several train stations on Long Island and several subway stations in Queens, goes into effect on Monday.

But those shuttle buses will only operate on weekdays, and only during the morning and evening rush hours — between 4:30 a.m. and 9 a.m., and between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. The buses are also only estimated to be able to carry some 26,000 passengers a day — a far cry from the 300,000 the LIRR carries on a typical workday.

Saturday’s strike comes after more than two years of contract negotiations, two federal mediation boards, and — most recently — two weeks of talks that failed to find common ground on the lone outstanding issue: how much the members of five LIRR trade unions can expect to be paid.

Both sides ultimately found their way to an agreement on back-pay, with a hand-shake agreement to retroactively raise wages by 3% for 2023, 3% for 2024, and 3.5% for 2025.

But the labor consortium — made up of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the Transportation Communications Union — demanded a 5% raise for 2026, which they said was necessary to keep up with inflation.

After initially refusing to go above 3% without further concessions from the unions on overtime work rules, MTA leadership ultimately offered the unions 3% plus a lump sum payment for the difference between a 3% raise and one year of pay at 4.5%.

The unions — negotiating a contract that was already three years behind schedule — argued that such a lump sum would only cover one year, regardless of how long a future contract took to negotiate.

And for roughly a week — despite negotiations running down to the wire Friday night — neither side moved.

And now, with the LIRR on strike, no one is moving.

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