S. Berliner, III's courtesy
times since the counter was installed.
2. You may wish to visit the Webmaster's RR and
LIRR pages* (et seq.), as well.
There IS a difference!
The Long Island Rail Road is the official name of the oldest Class 1 railroad still operating under its original name and charter (the B&O was older but has been subsumed into CSX). Although there was (and still is, on occasion) rolling stock and some official documents with the two words combined, the correct name of the LIRR has the two words separately, "Long Island Rail Road"!
There were and are other railroads on Long Island - these also are (or will be) covered here and on the Webmaster's Long Island Railroads page.
Re ex-railroad personnel
records - neither the LIRR nor any other local railroad (to your
Webmaster's knowledge) maintains any old ex-railroad personnel records in it's
archives (nor do the LIRRHS or your Webmaster - so please don't ask).
Those records are most likely lost. Click HERE
to go to the Webmasters RR page for hopefully-useful recommendations.
LIRR Ping Pong car baggage racks were available - click here.
BIG NEWS! - Dave Keller and Steve Lynch have produced a SECOND book of Dave's LIRR photos, many never before seen by the public, entitled:
The well-received first volume is:
On this page:
Long Island Rail Road Historical Society.
Books on the Long Island Rail Road.
End-of-Steam Ceremony, Hicksville, 08 Oct 1955.
(19 May 03)
On the Webmaster's Pages:
ALCO-GE-IR BOXCABS, now on a separate page,
including LIRR boxcabs #401, the world's first production diesel road switcher,
#402 (first and second), #403, and many others.
Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal Railroad,
and its successor roads, the New York Cross Harbor Railroad and New York Regional Rail.
Degnon Terminal Railroad, plus
The New York Connecting Railroad (the old New Haven line across the Hellgate Bridge
and down through Fresh Pond to Bay Ridge) will not be covered on this site; a new book about
the NYCRR is coming out, sponsored by the LI Sunrise-Trail Chapter, NRHS (see below).
However, see my Z-Scale Articles page for a detailed writeup on the Hellgate in Z (1:220).
Webmaster's LIRR pages (selected links - heavily truncated - see the full LIRR Index):
(14 May 03)
On the (first) LIRR page:
Long Island Sunrise-Trail Chapter
Sunrise Trail Division
Steam Locomotive #35 Restoration Committee
Steam Locomotive #39 Restoration
On the LIRR Continuation Page 2:
Odd Incident at Wreck Lead (on the LIRR)
LIRR and LI Railroad Miscellany
On the LIRR Continuation Page 3:
Victorian Stations Still Standing on the LIRR
etc.
On the LI Railroads Continuation Page:
Long Island Railroads
[with a link to the NYCRR (Hell Gate)]
etc. - see the full LIRR Index
On separate pages:
The New York & Atlantic Railway, lessor of LIRR freight operations.
Railroad Eagles - Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal, etc.
Bill Russell has a RR site about NY metropolitan area railroading and rail-marine operations (car floats, ferries, pocket terminals, BEDT, NYCH, LIRR and PRR, tugs) etc. Take a look starting with his Penny Bridge page.
One of his newsthreads was about the West Side Freight Line (the elevated trackage rotting away in southwestern Manhattan); it reminded the Webmaster of a rather bizarre feature of LI railroading (another item, about the WSFL, is on the Webmaster's RR page):
Across Manhattan and the east River, in the old Degnon yard, there is a line into the back of one of the IDNY buildings (the Webmaster forgets which, but thinks it may have been American Chicle) in which there is (probably dismantled, although certainly no longer usable) a freight car elevator that took cars up to the floors on where their cargo was needed or v.v. Scoff if you will but Vince Seyfried confimed just such on 02 Aug 2002.
NOTE: There is now The New York Connecting Railroad Society, an all-volunteer organization started in 1993 and recently incorporated to preserve the history of the joint venture between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New Haven (NYCRR and the Hell Gate Bridge); they publish a newsletter, "The Connecting".
See also HOW TO BOOT A STEAM LOCOMOTIVE or
How to hostle without really tiring (firing up a cold oil burner - 1:1 scale, that is).
The Long Island Rail Road Historical Society is an internal LIRR employees
and retirees group which can be reached by snail-mail at "Oyster Bay Train Station,
Oyster Bay, New York 11771" (where they have an exhibit in the waiting room).
They can be reached through David D. Morrison.
Dave is also the author of a book of LIRR steam locomotive photos (see the
LIRR Bibliography - with a special offer for readers of the Webmaster's RR pages)
or below. The Society was founded in 1987 to help celebrate the 100th
anniversary of the opening of present bi-level Jamaica Station.
The Long Island Rail Road is an agency of New York State's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It was chartered on 24 April 1834 to run from the Long Island City ferries across from Manhattan to Orient Point, some 120 miles east on the North Fork of Long island where it would connect by ferry with the Old Colony Railroad at Stonington, Connecticut, and so on to Boston.
This was a great idea until the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad bridged all the rivers and bays and inlets along the Connecticut coast ca. 1850 and provided direct rail service from New York City to Beantown. The LIRR, having ignored all the towns along the Island and having been built on the most barren (and inexpensive) land on the Island now had no "raison d'être" and had to scurry to build or buy branches to the population centers on Long Island. The LIRR finally connected directly with Manhattan on the completion in September 1910 of the East River ("Steinway") tunnels and Pennsylvania Station. Eventually, it fell into the hands of the Pennsylvania Railroad (1928-1949), before becoming part of the MTA in 1965.
Dave Morrison retired in May 1999 as the Long Island Rail Road's Branch Line Manager for the Port Jefferson, Oyster Bay, and Patchogue-to-Montauk Branches and is also active in the Long Island-Sunrise Trail Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society.
He is also well-known as, firstly, unofficial historian of the Pennsylvania Station eagles, about which he is writing a book, and as, secondly, the unofficial historian of the Grand Central Terminal eagles, about which he has already written a book (see the RAILROAD EAGLES page.
Dave is the compiler of: "Long Island Rail Road Steam Locomotive Pictorial.
Didja know? - The Nassau County Police Department's Second Precinct Booth D at the Locust Valley station, in an old two-story frame structure for the past few years, is actually the LIRR's old Locust (interlocking) Tower; it's pictured on the Webmaster's LIRR Continuation Page.
See Long Island Railroads [with a link to the NYCRR (Hell Gate)] - Railroads on Long Island - Flying and Fallen Flags (not including subways/elevateds) - First to Last (partial listing) for those old and forgotten (or all-but-forgotten) predecessors of today's LIRR.
See LIRR FIRSTS for the LIRR's greatest historical and technical achievements (other than just hauling millions of commuters - more than any other single such line).
The definitive LIRR books are those in a 7-volume series, THE LONG ISAND RAIL ROAD A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY, LoC #61-17477, by member Vincent F. Seyfried. All but Part 7 are out-of-print (as of 13 Oct 00) and very few libraries have them any more (they seem to vanish quickly):
[If you run across earlier volumes, snap them up;
full sets, when found, were going for $450-$750 a set (as of Oct 00)!
I finally completed my set on 13 Oct 00 for a fair price! What a treat!]
"Steel Rails to the Sunrise - The Long Island Railroad", Ron Ziel and George H. Foster,
Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1965, LoC 65-17166; a major history, profusely illustrated (b&w)
and heavily captioned (newer edition now available).
"The Pennsy Era on Long Island", Ron Ziel, Sunrise Special Ltd., Bridgehampton, 1984,
LoC RM222.2H63, ISBN 0-312-39564-7; photo collection (many in color).
"The Long Island Rail Road in Early Photographs", Ron Ziel,
Dover Publications, Mineola, 1990, ISBN 0-486-26301-0; photo collection (b&w), heavily captioned.
"Electric Heritage of the Long Island Rail Road - 1905-1975", Ron Ziel, with John Krause,
Carstens Publications, Newton, 1986, ISBN 911868-50-X; photo collection (b&w), heavily captioned
(with Errata Sheet).
For a much older history, the Long Island Division of the Queens Borough Public Library (89-11 Merrick Boulevard, Jamaica) has:
For motion pictures of LIRR steam in it's (Pennsy) glory days of the '50s, look at Ben Young's old hand-wound 16mm films from the "PENNSYLVANIA GLORY" tapes, Benjamin T. Young, Jr., especially Volume 1, produced and distributed by Herron Rail Video, 2016 North Village Avenue, Tampa, Florida 33612. (URL added 05 Feb 03)
See also the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association and the legendary LIRR Atlantic Avenue Tunnel.
Bob Andersen (not a member) has put up a major "unofficial" LIRR page, with considerable detail on Competing Railroads, Searching for Abandoned ROW's, Recently Abandoned Stations (on existing lines), Individual Branches, Joint LIRR - Elevated and Subway Service, a Bibliography, and System Maps.
Lorraine Diehl gave us a great slide show at the 18 Mar 99 meeting; if you haven't got a copy, you really should read her fantastic ode to "The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station". The meeting was also attended by Marijke A. Smit, Project Associate (in charge of history and archaeology) of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation"; they now expect to break ground on converting the sister McKim, Mead & White building, the James A. Farley Postal Center, into a glorious new Penn Station in 2000 and expect completion in 2003; there is an informative article on Marijke's excavation of the Jersey Meadows to uncover some of the pink marble debris dumped there when the Station was destroyed and also about some of the eagles and statuary that has been located and may return to grace the new building; it appeared as "End of An Error", the cover story of the April 1999 issue of Preservation, the Magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pp 43-51.
It appears that many other surviving, original Penn Station artifacts will also be incorporated - columns, clocks, chandeliers, lamp posts, balusters, etc.
Speaking of survivors, I was out at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union (Rockford) on 24 Aug 99 and there, fading away, was Power Pack FA-2m #602 {my notes say #604 and the number on the photo to be scanned isn't very legible but it's #602}.
30 Jun 99 was the 100th Anniversary of Mile-a-Minute Murphy's 60mph+ run on the LIRR near Farmingdale; there was to have been a commemorative ceremony at the Farmingdale Station on Saturday, 26 June (no, there was NOT a re-enactment!).
End-of-Steam Ceremony, Hicksville, 08 Oct 1955
- Scheduled steam-hauled passenger service came to an official end at the Hicksville
station on 08 October 1955 when two coach-loads of Boy Scouts were brought west
from Riverhead and east from Jamaica to meet at Hicksville. This material has
been moved to LIRR Historical Society
Continuation Page 1.
On the subject of "what is it?", Dave Morrison sent in this photo of a wall tile from the Long Beach Station and wonders about its design (I show it inverted to make my point):
This page is prepared and maintained as a courtesy by:
Consultant in Ultrasonic Processing
"changing materials with high-intensity sound"
Technical and Historical Writer, Oral Historian
Popularizer of Science and Technology
Rail, Auto, Air, Ordnance, and Model Enthusiast
Light-weight Linguist, Lay Minister, and Putative Philosopher
To contact S. Berliner, III, please click here.
of this series of the Webmaster's LIRR pages.
To tour the Webmaster's Long Island railroads pages in sequence, the arrows take you from the previous page to the LIRR index to the first LIRR page, and on to LIRR continuation pages 2 and up, then to the other LI railroads page, and lastly to this LIRR Historical Society page. Follow the links to the various yard maps and other related pages and sites.
© Copyright S. Berliner, III - 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 - All rights reserved.
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