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Re: (rshsdepot) A Trolley Grows in Brooklyn

I think the last streetcars (did anyone in Brooklyn or the city ever use the
word "trolley" for their streetcars?) over the 59th Street Bridge was 1957,
maybe 58..

Why is this trolley (!) going downtown when it could go to the highest
station on the F train at 9th Street, I wonder...?
How in the world is this trolley supposed to enter the short piece of the
Atlantic Avenue LIRR tunnel, that seems unlike;y, especially since it is so
short, where exactly would those trolleys go from there? Sounds weird

From the LV RR barge where concerts took place, one could see the covered up
PCC cars across the way...the barge is now upstate being fixed up at
Waterford.

Red Hook is so great with all the old Civil war era waterside buildings...if
Moses didn't cut it off it may not have lasted to now, all the historic
stuff...the huge grain elevator, as well maybe...

Will these "trolleys" use overhead wire power?

The LIRR abandoned the tunnel 1860 or so when City of Brooklyn outlawed
steam locomotives...it went to ferry at Atlantic Avenue...a cable car on
Montague Street went to ferries at its foot...

Diamond has theorized that an abandoned old locomotive is in a different
section of the tunnel...

Also, I probably said this already...the Brooklyn Bridegrooms of the
National League picked up the Dodger nickname playing at Eastern Park at the
site where the power plant sits abandoned at Van Sinderin south of Atlantic
Avenue on the Bay Ridge branch/division in East New York....they played
there 1892 to 1897, the first "trolleys" in NY, the Coney Island and
Brooklyn was one, the Jamaica line was nearby, and others, East NY was a hub
of transit, and that is where the fans had to dodge the streetcars and the
name came about,,,This was also the site of big Yale-Princeton football game
one year, and also of the Crescent Athletic Club of Bay Ridge who were in
the first football league, the American Football Union...Transportation was
very important in the choice of this site for Eastern Park, the Manhattan
Beach RR was very close, the streetcars mentioned, three Els I think went to
or near Manhattan Junction (now Broadway Junction), the LIRR Atlantic
Division as well..

  A listing of every football game played at Eastern Park can be found at:
http://www.mindspring.com/~luckyshow/football/ep.htm

Oh, and the Giants have visited the Mets since 1962 (and at the Polo Grounds
for a couple of years as well), there was a 24 inning game played back in
those early years in NY, at Shea

Paul
- -----Original Message-----
From: jdent1_@_optonline.net <jdent1@optonline.net>
To: rshsdepot_@_lists.railfan.net <rshsdepot@lists.railfan.net>
Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 12:08 PM
Subject: (rshsdepot) A Trolley Grows in Brooklyn


This is not a trolley email list, but the following article may be of
interest to those listmembers interested in NYC history and Robert Moses's
heritage, something that has been discussed on this list.  Just last week
the Giants were back in town and now the trolleys are back...

Also, does anyone know what tunnel was "discovered" under Atlantic Ave -
perhaps an original railroad structure?

From New York Newsday...

Trolley Back on Track
After a decade of delays, Brooklyn railway rolling forward

By Joshua Robin
Staff Writer

June 9, 2002

The clang of the trolley, missing from New York's bustle for 42
years, could soon ring out again in Brooklyn, where trolley buffs
are laying tracks along two waterfront streets in hopes that vintage
cars will be rolling by late summer.

"It's gonna happen,” predicted Bob Diamond, president of the
Brooklyn Historic Railway Association, who proposed the project
a decade ago and leads the digging. "It's no longer a pipe dream.
It's actually being laid out in pipe.”

Diamond, 42, has spent 10 years raising money and gaining
hard-won city approval for his dream of restoring trolley
service to Brooklyn. (That's the place, after all, where a
certain baseball team was named for those who dodged the trolleys.)

Now, a few days a week, he and a handful of volunteers -- including
a cartographer and a heavy-machine operator -- can be found on Reed
Street in Red Hook, jackhammering asphalt and lugging rails. Their
ultimate plan is to connect Red Hook on 1.6 miles of rail to a
subway station in Downtown Brooklyn. The once-gritty waterfront
neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the borough by the
building of the Gowanus Expressway in 1941, a project of master
builder Robert Moses.

Red Hook is now being gentrified, and the city has approved
laying track on six blocks, starting near the site of a
planned Fairway supermarket on the waterfront near Reed Street.

Diamond hopes to start the trolleys running occasionally once the
first two blocks are done, which is contingent on his getting
$50,000 promised by the City Council. The price of a trolley
fare has not been determined.

It would take about $4 million more to reach Downtown Brooklyn.
The last time trolleys thumped through New York, in 1960, the
ride cost 15 cents, Diamond said -- or nothing if you hitched
a ride on the back. But building them now costs about $260 per
foot, even with volunteer labor.

"If we had the money, we could get to Borough Hall in about
18 months,” Diamond said.

The city transportation department seems open to adding the
whole 1.6-mile route -- if Diamond can find funds elsewhere.

"Red Hook felt the brunt of Robert Moses more than any other ,”
said Tom Cocola, the department's spokesman. "The Gowanus
configuration has essentially ostracized Red Hook.”

Diamond hopes for $550,000 from a program to preserve landmarks
sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. He already
went through $238,000 in federal funds and about $250,000 in
private donations.

The next step is to build tracks down Richards Street, to the
mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, where there are plans to
build dual tracks, possibly on old rails long buried under
asphalt.

The route would then continue through a tunnel under Atlantic
Avenue that Diamond discovered in 1980 while he was on a break
from college. Electric lines have yet to be installed, but all
the equipment has been bought or acquired somehow.

In a city where waiting for a driver's license can take a year
off your life, Diamond said "it took us almost 10 years to get
all the permits and approvals.”

When not filling out paperwork, or pounding spikes, Diamond,
who is trained as an electrical engineer, manages an apartment
complex in New Jersey and hunts for used trolley equipment
aided by a network of trolley aficionados around the country.

He already has scooped up 16 usable trolley cars, now wrapped
in weather-resistant tarps and stored at the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, a former warehouse and in a lot near the start of the
tracks.

One real find was a regal-looking car from 1897 that was used
to ferry Norwegian royalty from Oslo to a nearby skiing mountain.
That one will be saved for special occasions, Diamond said. "We're
not going to use that one to haul people from Borough Hall,” he said.

The steepest expenditure of this project is insurance. The
cheapest will be electricity. It only costs about $6 an hour to
power a trolley, which coasts down streets after an initial jolt
of energy. Cars normally hold about 100 people.

"The word is simple,” John Smatlak, a Los Angeles-based consultant
with Railway Preservation Resources, said of street trolleys.
"It's probably safe to say it's a very inexpensive thing to
operate. I mean, you're just using up electricity.”

Residents of Red Hook see the trolley revival not as a touristy
throwback, but as an alternative to the mercurial buses to
Downtown Brooklyn.

"I have to work around their schedules,” said Leslie Chapman,
a homemaker who has lived in Red Hook all her 25 years.
She said she sometimes waits an hour for a bus.

Told of the trolley, she said: "That would be cute, if it
gets me where I'm going.”

Although the tracks are being laid far from the housing projects
where most people in Red Hook live, there seems to be no
disappointment -- only patience. "It's something we need,
because in any other community, you have a choice” of ways
to get around, said Emma Broughton, 71, who has been called
the mayor of Red Hook.

Diamond, a Brooklyn native with a beard as thick as a shaving
brush, estimates he's plunked down about $75,000 from his own
pocket. He's too young to have seen trolleys clatter down
Church Avenue, where they ended their Brooklyn run in 1956,
four years before the last city trolley clanged over the
Queensboro Bridge. But Diamond is nevertheless charmed at
the prospect of their return.

"It's really fun, seeing a piece of Brooklyn's history come
back to life,” he said. "Some people like to plant roses and
watch roses. I like planting trolley lines.”
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.



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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org


=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

------------------------------