- The word (12 Aug 03) is that something has gone terribly wrong at the BHRA and things are at a standstill, with a splinter group and all sorts of problems; Bob Diamond's own information on the BHRA site's "Project News & Updates" does not bode well for any of the projects noted below!  This is a dismaying prospect, indeed, and I think I will leave it at this and wait to see what devolves.

Well, what seems to have devolved is that the whole operation went belly-up in 2004!  What a shame.   (10 Feb 05)

URGENT! - SAVE THE TROLLEYS! - This quotation from the NEW YORK TIMES has been passed around so much that it is virtually public property and I trust they'll not crucufy me for repeating it here:   (14 Feb 05)

Trolley Cars in a Jam: Time to Roll, but Nowhere to Go
JAKE MOONEY, NY Times, February 13, 2005

"Life in New York is a story of square footage. All over the city, apartment dwellers fret about finding enough space for a growing family, or squeezing that one last chair into a crowded living room.

Jan Lorenzen and Arthur Melnick of Brooklyn are facing a similar quandary, albeit on a somewhat larger scale.

Mr. Lorenzen and Mr. Melnick, the founders of the nonprofit Brooklyn City Streetcar Company {the splinter group?}, need to find a home for 11 abandoned trolley cars, weighing 20 tons apiece, and they need to find one fast.

The cars have resided at the Brooklyn Navy Yard since 2001, taken there by a different group {the BHRA}, which had hoped to build a trolley line along the Red Hook waterfront.  When that plan fell apart and the group was evicted for not paying rent, the cars stayed.

'We consider them abandoned property,' said Eric Deutsch, president of the development corporation that manages the navy yard, now an industrial park.  'We'd love to find somewhere else for them to go and somebody who wants to take them, but ultimately they can't stay here.'

Enter Mr. Lorenzen and Mr. Melnick, who have proposed trolley lines in Coney Island or in the planned Brooklyn Bridge Park.  In a predicament that was first reported in The Brooklyn Paper, a weekly, Mr. Deutsch has said they can have the cars free but must find a way to move them and a place to put them (Manhattan Mini Storage, anyone?) while they perform repairs.

Considering the cars' size - each is 50 feet long and 10 feet high, bigger than most city buses - the task is easier said than done.

'We've gotten a few bites, and we're looking at a few things,' Mr. Melnick said, 'but it's difficult.  Land is at a premium in New York these days.'"

JAKE MOONEY

So, who can rescue these cars before it's too late?

It now (06 Jun 2005) appears no one could and the cars have been hauled away (per Brooklyn Newspapers); damn!   (06 Jul 05)

- [In what follows, the present tense was appropriate and has not been changed but this is now all historical, no longer of the present.]   (14 Feb 05)

The Brooklyn Historic Railway Association - a great group of trolley, traction, and transit (and railroad and history, etc.) enthusiasts who have banded together to restore, preserve, and operate "trolley" cars in the former great City of Brooklyn (now the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City), Kings County, Long Island, New York.

The BRHA has, and runs, Car N^o. 3, an 1897 "trolley" car from Oslo, Norway, which was brought here in 1970 and ran for a brief while under the Manhattan Bridge on the Jay Street Connecting RR.  The car was reputedly used personally at one time by the King of Norway.  It somewhat resembles a narrow single-truck Birney and was built in Nuremberg, Germany by Elecktr. Aktieselsk. F. Schuckert & Co. (their Mschr. Act. Ges. No. 305).

Car N^o. 3 originally was fitted with a pantagraph but has since been retrofitted with a trolley pole; when I first ran across it under the Manhattan Bridge, it was running on the end of a very long extension cord (I kid you NOT!).

The Association also has aquired no less than fifteen (15!) PCC cars from Boston and Cleveland, which they hope to run in downtown Brooklyn on local revenue and tourist service, plus an ex-U. S. Army 20-ton Vulcan gasoline-powered switcher.

The Brooklyn Historic Railway Association is the original non-profit organization formed by Bob Diamond and others back in 1982.  One of the things the BHRA did and continues to do, is work on the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (see below).  The primary project, however, is the trolley project in Red Hook, and now the BHRA has added a second project to its plate, street running, although the concept is to ultimately connect the two.  The official title for the trolley is the "Brooklyn Heritage Trolley Project", but folks (including Bob) began referring to it as the "Brooklyn Trolley Museum".

We start with Jan Lorenzen, who with Kevin Fitzgerald, is the core of the car restoration department, although the track and traction power construction guys {what, no gals?} help out with the cars too, as needed; here he is cranking away in the cab of one of the Boston PCCs, followed by some PCC body work, and a cab interior shot:

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Railnutter's "The Brooklyn Historic Trolley" section, Issue 17, of Railnutter News,

both of which are replete with photos of the trolleys and their environs.

My fellow (Long Island) Motor Parkway Panel member, Kevin Walsh, has great coverage of the BHRA on his "Diamond in the Rough" page, in turn on his fantastic "Forgotten New York" site.

Bill Russell's encyclopedic Penny Bridge rail site covers the BHRA as "Brooklyn Trolley Museum".

See also David Pirmann's "Brooklyn" segment of his NYCSubway site.

Don Ross, my "Boxcab buddy", also has coverage on his BHRA page on his extensive RAILSPOT - Don's Rail photos site.

Saul Blum's The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel pages (with old maps).

Dear to my (SB,III's) heart are early ALCo-GE-IR (and other) Boxcab Oil-Electrics (Diesels) and you also might wish to take a look at my Railroads, Pennsylvania RR (PRR), Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal RR (BEDT), Degnon Terminal RR, Marion River Carry RR, Model Railroading, ALCo, EMD - Electro-Motive Division of GM, and Z-Scale (1:220) Model Railroading pages, etc.

The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel

Bob further advises that that old fellow mentioned had been interviewed by the Daily News and that the spot where his building was is now the exit ramp of the BQE (Brooklyn Queens expressway - Coises!  Ferled again!).  Ca. 1990, a contractor did some pro-bono work for Bob and dug three holes in Atlantic Avenue between Hicks and Columbia Streets, where Bob showed him to dig, using an old map Bob has (see the "Blum" link, above).  He hit the tunnel at all three spots and they found the portal area and, 18 feet down, what appeared to be a brick platform.  Bob reports that the walls were granite, with a sort of "panelled" effect carved in.  The holes were 3' x 3', so not much was exposed.  The idea was to keep the holes open and continue the excavation, but someone from the Dinkins administration (not Dinkins himself) put the kibosh on the project, even though the work was done under permit.  That contractor also put in the larger manhole though which access is made today.  Only ca. 1997, the City attempted to remove the tunnel entirely (for ease of running underground utilities) and was thwarted by concerned citizens!  Work will, hopefully, be resumed under a more benevolent and culturally-concerned City administration.

This is a new drawing of an old tunnel drawn by the BHRA; I will, hopefully, get a bigger and sharper image for you.

L.I.'s NEWSDAY had an article (undated), " A Long-Lost Tunnel in Brooklyn", by Sidney C. Schaer, Staff Writer.

Pratt Institute's Architecture Students intended to break ground "in constructing an entry to the oldest subway in the world:  The 1844 Atlantic Avenue Railroad Tunnel" in the Summer of 1996 and there is an illustrated story on this; unfortunately, however, their School of Architecture burned down then (is there a moral here?) and they never got around to the project.

There is a high-res. picture inside the tunnel at Harve Wein's site (not all his photos are so innocuous, though, and may capture your server).

On 01 May 00, Tama Janowitz, a Brooklyn novelist, wrote " Shades of New York: A Historical Family Outing - The oldest subway tunnel in the world is also a jet-set playground" for the EdificeRex site, an upscale NYC Webzine (developing and maintaining intranets for buildings participating in the EdificeRex Network).

There are also endless brief mentions of the Tunnel on many other Websites.

WELL!  That "old" man was only "old" by young Bob Diamond's standards back in 1981!  Per an article by Albert Davila in the 11 Sep 1981 issue of the New York Daily News, "There is so a locomotive in there, he says", the "old" man was then-55-year-old Brooklyn seaman Juan Vega (who passed away ca. 1990).  He used to live in a tenement house at 64 Atlantic Avenue and played in a hole in the basement, which he and his friends enlarged, allowing them to crawl into the tunnel.  My how the story changes; Post Office (the game), anyone?  Vega remembered a big locomotive, much older than the kind he saw in Western movies, sitting on wooden ties in the section between Hicks and Columbia Streets; it had a brass panel with the builder's data (name, date, etc.), which they used to polish, but he no longer remembered what it said (damn!).

There's only one appropriate response to all this:

The The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (as of 07 Sep 1989); I personally think it should be listed in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places and on the Historic American Engineering Record, as well.

Now, as with the Brooklyn Trolley Museum photos above, Bob Diamond has also furnished detailed photos and captioning for the AAT:

We start with test borings between Hicks & Columbia Streets.  Before digging, Bob had a pro-bono contractor drill test borings; the top photo shows the drill rig and the lower shows brick grindings from the tunnel roof coming up the auger:

This is the approach ramp right by the West Portal; note the transition from granite block to brick.  Also, note the pin-point accurate test boring hole in the brick from the day previous.  This area last saw daylight in 1861.  Thanks to a "misguided", or possibly "miscreant" NYC bureaucrat of the Dinkin's administration, and his buddy, a gun-happy "inspector", it may never again see the light of day {nothing like "bully-boy" tactics to discourage preservation! - SB,III}:

I believe that's it for the nonce - beeeecause: