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[caption id="attachment_73252" align="alignnone" width="510"] Old Sag Harbor train depot. RMLI file photo[/caption]
By Michelle Trauring
As a general rule, what happened in the United States happened on Long Island first — at least when it comes to the railroad.
There are no surprises, then or now, according to Don Fisher, president of the Railroad Museum of Long Island. What may have started as tracks across the sand is now a booming, billion-dollar industry, but history is cyclical, he noted, and human nature stays the same.
“After all these years — 180 years — things really haven’t changed much in the human existence. The shenanigans continue!” he said with a laugh. “But if it wasn’t for the railroad, our country wouldn’t be connected and, before that, Long Island wouldn’t be connected like it is. It changed the face of the East End, changed the face of Long Island east of Brooklyn and Queens. Without the railroad, we wouldn’t have had the development that we have today.”
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In front of the old Greenport scoot at the Sag Harbor train depot. RMLI file photo[/caption]
The history of the Long Island Rail Road in particular is a colorful one — which Fisher will discuss on Thursday at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton — and began long before the Montauk Branch ever existed.
The year was 1834, when the primary mode of transportation was horse and wagon. Ships came into New York and Boston from Long Island and points farther east, clogging up the harbor to the point where “people could literally walk from one boat to the other and almost get across from Brooklyn to Manhattan,” Fisher said. “It was just a miserable, miserable port.”
There had to be another answer, and so the principals of the newfound Long Island Rail Road hatched a plan: they would lay tracks from Brooklyn to Greenport, which would provide an access point to Connecticut, where travelers could pick up another train to Boston — freeing up some of the traffic coming in and out of New York, while simultaneously profiting them.
In five years, they were bankrupt. The New York and New Haven Railroad had arrived, connecting tracks through New London on to Stonington, Conneticut to Boston.
They went back to the drawing board.
“These guys were very, very myopic. So, now, here we’ve got this train line and a big scramble: How are we going to make money with it? And then all of a sudden, the shenanigans started with competition,” Fisher said. “The Long Island Rail Road got creative, built a line from Manorville to Eastport and out to Bridgehampton and eventually up to Sag Harbor, and cut everyone else off.
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Don Fisher is president of the Railroad Museum of Long Island. RMLI courtesy photo[/caption]
“There were common board members with some of these smaller railroads — insider trading, if you will — so they turned around and absorbed and purchased all of these other properties,” he continued. “The back door deals that were made, everything we talk about today, it’s all been done ad nauseam for years and years. It’s kind of fun and colorful to see this.”
This critical strategic maneuvering in the 1870s led to the Long Island Rail Road as it exists on the East End today, he said, though some of the original stations have long since shuttered their doors. Owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority since 1966, the Long Island Rail Road is the busiest commuter rail in North America, equally loved and hated by its passengers alike.
“People, in general, are commuters and they use the train to get in and out of New York City, and they love the train because it brings them home at night and they hate the train because it takes them to work in the morning,” Fisher said. “It’s an interesting conundrum for people on Long Island.”
“I think, today, the love of trains still rests with our young people. It’s the motion, it’s the movement,” he added. “For older people who remember cross-country travel on the trains before airlines took over, it’s the romance, it’s the idea of getting on that train and going to new places across the country. You go at a much slower pace than you do in a jet, and you get to see more of the country. There’s a love that built up with our octogenarians and our older folks because they lived it, and it was their major mode of transportation. They hang onto that romance.”
“The Long Island Rail Road in Southampton” with Don Fisher will be held on Thursday, September 28, at 5:30 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. Admission is free. For more information, please call (631) 283-0774 or visit myrml.org.
on Sep 27, 2017