The North Fork once boasted a collection of LIRR train stations, spaced about three miles apart, for the convenience of passengers. This distance made it easy to travel between hamlets and move freight to and from the main hub in Riverhead. Taking the train was much faster than walking or taking a horse and buggy to the next village.

“If you walk normally, you can go about three miles in an hour. So if you have a station every three miles or so, the most somebody’s going to have to walk is a mile and a half to get to the station,” said George Walsh, trustee and archivist for the Railroad Museum of Long Island.

“People used to take the train to go from Greenport to Mattituck to visit friends and family,” said museum president Don Fisher.

One of the destinations along the route to Greenport was the Methodist camp in Jamesport, located between South Jamesport and Washington avenues.

“People could literally step off the train with their bags, and you didn’t even have to come pick them up with a horse and wagon, they could walk there … and families would take a cottage for a week,” said Mr. Fisher. “The houses are still there, people live in them, and there’s a road, a circle, that comes in, and in the center, where they used to have like a common area with grass. Now the trees have grown up in there, but the road still goes in and circles around.”

Besides moving people along, the railroad also served to transport all manner of things to and from the North Fork. One of the most prominent products was ducks. At first, the birds were taken live from the farms in stock cars and dispatched when they reached the city.

“That was not an optimal way to deal with the ducks. Too many ducks died. You would lose your product on the two-hour, three-hour trip. It’s very stressful for the animals. So, that didn’t last for very long,” said Mr. Fisher.

Instead of shipping live, the farmers began processing the birds locally and placing them in barrels of brine. Once flash freezing became widespread, the birds were frozen and sent in refrigerated cars.

“The feathers we used for down, for bedding, pillows, clothing, and the ducks were used, consumed altogether,” said Mr. Fisher. “Now everything’s [shipped] on a truck.”

Possibly even more important to Long Island’s duck farming was the feed, which came via freight cars. Crates of feed came from suppliers like Purina to merchants, who then sold it to the farmers. Crescent Duck Farm had its own miniature industrial railroad to move the feed around the farm. This tiny train is now at the Railroad Museum facility in Riverhead.

Another important way the train served local farms was by transporting fertilizer components. These components were transported to fertilizer plants, which were built near the train yards. They had a crane house where each component was mixed as it traveled down a conveyor to the waiting farmer. “They could put it in bags, or they could run a truck right underneath this thing, and the various components would come down the chute into the back of the truck,” said Mr. Fisher.

Another key function of the railroad was to haul mail to postmasters to then distribute to residents. According to the classic Long Island Rail Road photo book, “Steel Rails to the Sunrise” by Ron Ziel, there was a rule stating that within a certain distance, measured door to door, the post office was responsible for carrying the mail from the train. Otherwise, the station master had to move the mail.

“When they built [the station in Laurel], the door was on the south side of the station, facing the tracks. And the post office manager said, ‘You guys are responsible for bringing the mail to us.’ And the Long Island Railroad station master called up what they called buildings and bridges, the B&B department, and said, ‘Come out here, we need a door on the north side of the building.’ So the railroad sent the carpenters out,” said Mr. Fisher. “And now the station agent called up the postmaster at Laurel post office, and said, ‘Get your tape out and come down and measure to the door again.’ So out comes the postmaster with his wheel, he measured the footage, and they were inside the line.”

After the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the Long Island Rail Road, many of the large, beautiful station buildings were removed or downsized to shelters. Some stations, like Aquebogue, Jamesport, Peconic and Laurel, were shuttered. After the LIRR was taken over by the MTA, the cuts deepened.

“Once we got past World War II, and we got into the ’50s, people were making money and the economy was good. Everybody wanted a car,” Mr. Fisher said.

“And the automobile industry, the bus industry, were instrumental in getting rid of trolleys and also tearing down railroads. We built the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System … They didn’t need the train anymore,” he continued.

This downsizing continued, until service was actually discontinued for a time in the 1960s, and the LIRR ran buses for two decades, from 1962 to 1982.

“When you got a bus here, you went to Huntington, because the bus went up Sound Avenue after it left Riverhead, it stayed on 25A into Huntington. You got off the bus in Huntington, and you got on a train in Huntington that took you the rest of the way to Jamaica and to Penn Station,” said Mr. Fisher.

Service resumed, and though there are more riders on the weekends than at other times, passengers are still rolling into North Fork train stations.

“We’ve had that problem, that challenge, of getting people to ride,” said Mr. Fisher. “We’ve got more trains running today than I can remember since I was a little boy. We actually have four round-trips to Greenport, and we have an additional, fifth round-trip here to Riverhead.”

Other stories in the Keeping Track of History series:

Wading River Station

Calverton Station

Manorville Station

Riverhead Station

The post Keeping track of history: When trains ruled the North Fork appeared first on Riverhead News Review.

That was in 1844, when the Long Island Rail Road extended its line to Riverhead.

The new spur turned the East End from an isolated agricultural outpost into the bread-and-veggie-basket of New York. In addition to its geographical centrality, Riverhead had been Suffolk County’s seat of government since 1727, making it the natural choice for a rail center.

“We were an agricultural economy, we were a seafaring economy,” said Don Fisher, president of the Railroad Museum of Long Island. “Riverhead became the center and was physically, geographically, and certainly population-wise, the center of our county, and became the hub for our government. Everybody moved everything by boat before the railroad got here.”

Populations on the East End at that time were concentrated along the shorelines. The farmers who did begin to cultivate the Forks had good soil for growing all kinds of crops, including the potatoes and cauliflower the region was known for. And before the experimental farms, farmers didn’t believe that they could go into the Pine Barrens. 

Because of the railroad, the Forks could now supply the rest of Long Island, which at that time included Brooklyn, and Manhattan with fresh produce. Farmers could take their products and put them on a train into cold cars, and have them reach population centers often within a day or two after harvest. 

Farm produce coming into Riverhead went through the auction houses, where it was bought by brokers and then put on the railroad cars to be transported out of the area. These brokers sold to supermarkets and others — usually within two days of the vegetables being dug up.

“That stimulated everything in farming out here, because farmers now weren’t just growing for themselves and Suffolk County,” Mr. Fisher said. “They had a way, with the railroad, to be able to ship more and more produce, putting more and more acreage into production.”

The system proved remarkably efficient for its time.

“We had this thing licked. We had it down, farm to table,” he said. “The tables were in New York City. 
The tables were the people living in the tenements along the East River, the people living in Brooklyn.”

The LIRR used special cars lined with ice, known as reefers. These cars were filled from above via a hopper at the ice plant. There were vents at either end to circulate air, and melted ice and condensation would run out onto the track. 

Riverhead yard also had a special engine called a hostler to move cars through a complicated network of sidings. Each siding had an assigned purpose, and a crew could kick three boxcars off so they went into Brooklyn. 

“The actual work of moving all of this produce was time sensitive, laborious and it required resources from the railroad to make it work,” Mr. Fisher said. “One of those resources, we got our own locomotive.”

At first, the LIRR extension did not result in a population boom on the East End. Because the land was so productive, the properties proved more valuable for farming. Keeping those fields open for cultivation produced more wealth than dividing them for houses.

“The railroad coming here, creating a better economy for the farmers, limited the amount of people that were going to come out here at the time and build houses and live here, because the property was so valuable for farming,” Mr. Fisher said.

It wasn’t until after World War II that the railroad, combined with the highways, helped supercharge Long Island’s population growth as developments like Levittown blossomed. 
Before the war, bulk produce dominated traffic heading west from the East End.

It wasn’t only produce leaving the East End headed west that made use of Riverhead Station. Freight was also shipped east. Anything big, bulky or heavy was easier to ship via rail.

LILCO, the predecessor to LIPA, had two sidings in Riverhead because their poles and transformers came out on the train. Farm equipment was often shipped on flatcars. There were also smaller items that came via post cars and baggage cars on the railroad. Mail order items from catalogs would be left in the freight house for someone to pick up in their wagon and take home.

“We think about things that come to us today on UPS, FedEx, Postal Service — those things came out in special cars, baggage cars, railroad post office cars, and they went to the train station or to the little freight house,” said Mr. Fisher.

Because Riverhead is the county seat, the railroad also made it easier for politicians to attend meetings. Instead of taking a week to trek out to Riverhead for monthly business, it was a matter of days by train. 

Before Suffolk County had a Legislature, it was controlled by supervisors of the 10 towns and they would meet in Riverhead once a month. With the railroad, they could get on the train at 6 in the morning and be there by 9 a.m. They could meet all day, stay overnight and be home the next day.

“Not only was this great for the people that were doing the work, but it saved government money,” Mr. Fisher explained.

Instead of putting politicians up for four or five nights in Riverhead, they only had to stay one night.

“We were saving taxpayers’ dollars,” he said.

Today, the LIRR still has a stop at Riverhead, but the old railway center serves as the home of the Railroad Museum of Long Island.

Other stories in the Keeping Track of History series:

Wading River Station

Calverton Station

Manorville Station

North Fork stations

The post Keeping track of history: How Riverhead’s station fed New York appeared first on Riverhead News Review.