Huntington – Amityville Tram
The Huntington – Amityville tram was an interurban tram service in Suffolk County in the US state of New York , which existed from 1890 to 1927. For the most part, the operation was limited to the city of Huntington , only from 1909 to 1919 the railways drove beyond the city limits to Amityville , which belongs to the city of Babylon . Due to the terminus of the route, which were in Huntington on the north coast and in Amityville on the south coast of Long Island , the train was marketed as a Cross Island Trolley during the largest expansion of the operation .
history
The Huntington Railroad Company , founded in May 1890, built a standard-gauge horse - drawn railway that opened on July 19, 1890 to connect the Huntington station on the Long Island Rail Road , which is just under five kilometers from the coast, to the Hicksville – Wading River line . The single-track route led from the station through New York Avenue to its northern end in the Halesite district , where the railroad depot was also located. On March 5, 1898, Long Island Rail Road acquired the railway and incorporated it into the Long Island Consolidated Electric Companies subsidiary . It built an overhead line and on June 17, 1898, electrical operation with two-axle railcars on the line began. At Huntington station, a track connection to the railroad was built for the transport of luggage and a luggage station was opened at the port.
In the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, plans began for an extension of the line to the south to connect the three lines of the Long Island Rail Road running through Long Island in an east-west direction. The total of around 30 kilometers long single-track line went into operation on August 25, 1909. The extension led from Huntington Station on New York Avenue and Walt Whitman Road to Melville. This was followed by a section on its own track east of Walt Whitman Road. Today Route 110 is on this route. Along Broad Hollow Road, Conklin Street and Main Street, the route then reached Farmingdale. From there the train continued through Main Street and along Broadway to Amityville. At Amityville station, a bridge was built over the railroad, which was connected on both sides with a short stretch of its own railroad as well as over Sterling Place on the north side and Greene Avenue on the south side. The route was then in Broadway, Bennett Place and South Ireland Place and turned into Richmond Avenue, at the southern end of the coast was the terminus. The travel time on the entire route was 76 minutes. Reinforcement cars were used between Huntington and Halesite station, and at times between Amityville station and the south coast, to supplement the trains running every hour on the entire route. The fleet now consisted of six four-axle railcars bought second-hand from the Ocean Electric Railway , which drove on the cross-island line and in Amityville, and the seven previous two-axle cars that operated in Huntington. In Amityville there was a transition to the Babylon tram from 1910 , in Farmingdale, as before in Huntington, a track connection to the railroad was built for luggage transport.
The operation on the line developed well at first. After the USA entered World War I , however, excursion traffic almost completely ceased. In addition, the war-related rise in fares and increasing automobile traffic, so that on September 23, 1919 the last trams were running on the entire route. The section between siding no. 7 north of Melville and the coast in Amityville has been closed and dismantled. The Long Island Rail Road sold the remainder of the line in 1920 to the Huntington Traction Company , which resumed operations between Halesite and Turnout 7. The four-axle railcars came back to the Ocean Electric Railway, so only the old two-axle cars remained on the line. On the section between Huntington station and turnout 7, a single shuttle car now drove every hour, which shortly thereafter only ran as far as the Jericho Turnpike in South Huntington, so that the route was also closed from there to turnout 7. The dense cycle between Huntington Station and Halesite was maintained, as this section could continue to operate economically. Around 1924 the shuttle to South Huntington was discontinued and, as before 1909, the route ended again at Huntington station. After the almost 30-year-old railcars and tracks were so worn that they could only continue to operate with unjustified financial expenses, the railway ceased operations on August 15, 1927 and was then dismantled. Today, the S1 bus route, operated by Suffolk County Transit , roughly follows the route of the tram.
literature
- Felix E. Reifschneider: Trolley Lines of the Empire State. Orlando FL, 1950, 31-31.