The Railroad Museum
of Long Island
Long Island Rail Road History
| Which Railroad can lay claim to these and many other firsts?
If you said the Long Island Rail Road, you'd be right.
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to the station On the 25th of April, 1832, the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad Company was incorporated. At this time, the principal engineer in this project, Major D.B. Douglass, was already making plans for a direct connection between Boston and New York City via rail and ferry. In 1832, the route following the coast of Connecticut, which has many bays and inlets, was considered to be impassable. However, Douglass believed that a rail line down the center of Long Island and then to a connecting ferry, would cut the travel time from NYC to Boston from the current 16 hrs by ship to 11 hrs. On April 18th, 1834, the Brooklyn and Jamaica RR was completed and the Long Island Rail Road leased it and began laying east rails that same day. The Long Island received it's charter from the New York State Legislature on April 24th. At the time, Brooklyn was it's own city, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties were all rural. Other than scattered farmers in the interior, most of the population were in villages along the coast. Many of these villages were centered around the whaling industry. In addition to the flatness of the land mentioned before, the lack of villages & roads made a central route for the LIRR the best choice. This bypassing of towns and villages along the coast would come back to haunt the railroad and hurts it to this day. Rails continued to be laid until the financial panic of 1837. At this time, the railroad had completed 15 miles of mainline and a single branch, from current day Mineola to Hempstead. The terminus of the main was in a village that has become known as Hicksville, named after the LIRR's President, Valentine Hicks. Construction east started again 4 years later. By the end of that year, rails extended to Farmingdale and were also being laid west from Greenport, on the island's north fork. On July 27th, 1844, the first three special excursion trains ran from Brooklyn to Greenport on the newly completed line. The first train was scheduled to arrive in Greenport in five hours. The train amazed even Maj. Douglass by making the trip in three and a half! In 1850, the impassable Connecticut route was opened and the Long Island's traffic fizzled. Grudgingly, the railroad began to serve the island's local residents. A short spur was run from Hicksville to Syosset in 1854. The days of the fastest route to Boston were over. back
to the station By 1859, Brooklyn had outlawed steam locomotives along Altantic Ave., even though the railroad was a main reason for Brooklyn's prosperity. The railroad changed it's western terminus to Long Island City. Within a few years, the city elders were begging for the railroads return, but it was too late. The Long Island seemed to be always battling the locals. Be it fires set by the wood burning locomotives, farm animals being killed or the fact of a mainline in the middle of nowhere, the officers of the road had set the stage for competitors. In 1863, Oliver Charlick became the President of the LIRR and so began the worst 12 years of the railroad's history. Charlick refused to build branch lines to the coastal towns. This only moved those villages to try to build their own rail lines. Charlick fought these upstarts and even built branches in the middle of nowhere to cut off the other rail lines advances. Charlick fought with town officials constantly. To show who had the power, he ordered the nearly completed grade from Syosset to Cold Spring Harbor abandoned and a new route constructed several miles south of the village. As additional punishment, he refused to allow any train to stop there. The towns of Huntington Station and Port Jefferson Station exist today because of similar battles with the towns of Huntington and Port Jefferson. Even after the failure of the Boston route, the Long Island could have been built to serve the Island. Charlick made sure that it didn't. No greater disaster has befallen the LIRR than Charlick's tenure. back
to the station Throughout the 1860's and the first half of the 1870's, Oliver Charlick fought his personal wars against the other rail lines and the general population of the island. Many lines had been built - The South Side, The New York & Flushing, The Woodside & Flushing, the Central railroad of Long Island, The Flushing & North Side... Eventually, thankfully, in 1875, Charlick was removed from office. Conrad Popenhusen by this time had taken control of the South Side, the Central roads and the Flushing & North Side and consolidated them into a system almost as large as the Long Island. After Carlick was removed, Poppenhusen took control of the Long Island as well and combined all the railroads into the LIRR. During this time, he lost 3 million dollars and the LIRR went into receivership once again. Austin Corbin was named president of the railroad. Under Corbin's reign, the wars stopped, revenue went up and the LIRR expanded to it's greatest extent. During these years, railroads were reaching into every town of any size thoughout the nation. Reliable and economic transportation was the order of the day and Long Island was no exception. Along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where steam locomotives had been banned years earlier, trains ran every 15 minutes in each direction for 19 hours a day. During rush hours, they ran every 10 minutes. The Long Island RR was paying dividends! Mr. Corbin realized that this could not continue forever. His grandest plan for the LIRR was to build a trans-Atlantic port at Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, on the southern fork. This would enable ships to land 120 miles east of New York City, have their loads and passengers transferred to rail cars which could then be delivered anywhere in the city or on the mainland. New York harbor was becoming crowded in the 1890's and this idea had strong backing. Many of the nation's wealthy had mansions on Long Island and Corbin used his connections. The Montauk Extension Railroad Company was chartered in 1893 and by 1895 the line was opened. This project was not only meant to attract established steamship lines to the new route. The American Steamship Company was organized by Corbin and his backers. The European terminus for this project was to be Milford Haven in Wales. After British representatives had approved the project, the US Army Corps of Engineers found the cost to improve the harbor, building the required docks and customs houses would be much higher than estimated. Congress voted against funding the project 3 times before 1896. Once the rail line was opened to Montauk, Corbin took up the fight personally. Before the final vote on funding, Austin Corbin was killed in an accident. His successors tried to obtain funding and complete the project, but without Corbin, the project eventually faded away. For the second time in the 19th century, a rail-ship connection from a fork of Long Island vanished. With the change of the century, the LIRR's destiny would change too. back
to the station In 1900, it became clear that the Pennsylvania railroad would obtain a franchise to build a tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan. The PRR took control of the LIRR in exchange for providing the LIRR with her desired tunnels. Having the additional tunnels built under the East River allowed the PRR to eliminate a problem inherent in the Grand Central Station design; The need for storage and servicing tracks. Sunnyside yards in Long Island City, were to become the largest passenger car servicing yard in the world. Trains entering New York from the west could de-train their passengers and then go to Sunnyside while New York Central's trains needed to be serviced at the station. The opening of the East River tunnel changed the destiny of the LIRR forever. Freight traffic would take a 'back seat' to passenger service until the present day and on into the foreseeable future. The Long Island Rail Road was always an independent line, even for decades after the Pennsy had taken over. The LIRR would not become just another subsidiary line of the Standard railroad of the World. It was not until the 1920's that the PRR started to assert it's ownership more vigorously. As trains got longer and heavier and locomotives build in the late 1800's neared their retirement, the Altoona and Juniata shops started producing E-4's, E-6's, H-8's, H-9's, H-10's and G-5's for the LIRR. It was during this period that the LIRR took on the face of the Pennsylvania. It was the construction of Pennsylvania Station and the tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, that brought electrification to the Long Island Rail Road. Steam locomotives could not be used in the tunnels and so electric locomotives were needed. Strangely though, while the PRR used overhead or catenary, wires to provide electricity to locomotives, the Long Island uses a "third rail", which is just above ground level. Jamaica, the terminus of Long Island's first railroad, the Brooklyn & Jamaica, had long been the central station of the Long Island Rail Road. To this day, almost every branch of the LIRR leads to Jamaica. Today, "Hub & Spoke" systems are well know with air travelers. This system of bringing passengers to one location and transferring them there is much more economical. Jamaica station was operating as the hub of the LIRR for many years before the Wright brothers took to the air. Jamaica was the obvious choice to change from steam to electric locomotives, and the call "Change at Jamaica" is still heard to this day. The Pennsylvania Railroad controlled the Long Island Rail Road until it's own bankruptcy in the 1960's. While many blamed the Pennsy for many of the LI's troubles, without the Pennsy's owned ship, the LIRR would not and could not be the largest commuter railroad in the world. back
to the station Those who require it's services either tolerate it or hate it, but can't live without it. Millions of passengers every year are carried from New York City to their homes on Long Island without incident. Without this railroad of great importance, today's Long Island would not exist. With the coming of suburban America after the Second World War, the Long Island Rail Road's poorly laid out routes finally began to pay off. Towns have grown up around the tracks that a century ago were in the middle of nowhere. Sleek, modern electric trainsets rush passengers past the cars stuck in rush hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway - otherwise known as the world's longest parking lot. The Long Island Rail Road has completed electrification as far east as Ronkonkama. It has performed major upgrades in the road's physical plant, has ordered new 3000hp locomotives from GMD which will be built in the old hometown of American Locomotive, Schenectedy, NY. and is testing rebuilt FL-9 diesel-electric locomotives to take trains directly from non-electrified branches right to Pennsylvania Station. One day soon, the whistle of the Long Island Rail Road's finest steam locomotives, #39 will be heard once again over the island. The Long Island Rail Road's future looks to be as interesting as has been it's past. The information from this page comes from the book, Steel Rails to the Sunrise, by Ron Ziel |
