{"id":4878,"date":"2023-11-28T21:09:40","date_gmt":"2023-11-29T02:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vanshnookenraggen.com\/_index\/?p=4878"},"modified":"2024-03-06T18:12:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T23:12:42","slug":"the-last-train-to-jamaica-how-nyc-almost-replaced-its-els","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vanshnookenraggen.com\/_index\/2023\/11\/the-last-train-to-jamaica-how-nyc-almost-replaced-its-els\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Train to Jamaica: How NYC Almost Replaced Its Els"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image of Queensboro Plaza, twice as large as it is today, before unification. Undated.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The New York City subway is famously made up of three formerly private railroads; three distinct networks that were planned to be separate and, at best, to compliment one another. Looking at the subway map today, it\u2019s hard to see the layers of history when then overall composition looks like a mess of spaghetti dropped over a map of the city. But each line has a story to tell, and each story relates to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elevated trains are synonymous with New York City (and Chicago for that matter). A complex web of elevated tracks once covered much of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But with the advent of the subway, the city pushed to remove the els from its streets. Some els were built as part of the subway, and these were planned to stay. But the older els were not long for this world. Today, only a small section of pre-subway elevated tracks remain along Broadway and Myrtle Ave in Brooklyn. Like the Coelacanth<\/a>, they somehow survived despite the odds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The First Elevateds<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subway that we know today was not the first transit network the city had. Horse-drawn carriages, first with wooden wheels but soon with metal wheels running on iron tracks embedded into the streets, were the original mass transit. Private omnibus companies created chaos on the streets, with traffic jams so bad that, at one point, the city considered building pedestrian bridges<\/a> over Broadway so that people could cross.<\/p>

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As the city grew northward, the increasingly long omnibus rides became untenable. While London had opened the world\u2019s first subway line in 1863, it was a notoriously dirty and dangerous affair, as steam locomotives would quickly fill the tunnels with smoke and soot. Ventilation was primitive and non-effective, and it would be a generation before electricity could even be produced, let along used for train power.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Charles Thompson Harvey making a southbound test run along the Greenwich Street portion of his cable-driven West Side and Yonkers Patented Railway. This image was taken in December 1867 at 39 Greenwich Street. Source Wikipedia via Joseph Brennan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The only alternative, like so many things in New York, was to go up into the sky. The first elevated rail line, soon simply known as an \u201cEl\u201d, opened in 1868 as little more than a technology demonstration. The single track was lifted above the sidewalk along Greenwich St and 9th Ave, between Battery Place and 29th St. The track was supported by a line of single columns made of steel beams, giving it the nickname of the \u201cone-legged railroad\u201d. The line used cable cars pulled by a mile long cable running along the tracks. Deemed a success, the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway Co was given a license to extend its railroad all the way to Yonkers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite this success, the railroad soon ran into legal and technological troubles. The cable car technology was inconsistent, and the mile long cables often snapped. The railroad was allowed to convert the line to steam power, and strengthened the supports. Ridership was low (due in part to the small number of original stations) and the railroad defaulted on three mortgages. In 1871 the railroad were sold at auction and reorganized as the New York Elevated Railroad (NYER). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NYER set about expanding the line. It added new stations and began extending the track northward. In 1878, the railroad began to double-track the line. By 1879, the line had been extended all the way to 155th St. The success of the NYER lead to a scramble to build other lines. In 1878, els along 6th Ave, 3rd Ave and 2nd Ave began growing skyward and northward from the tip of Lower Manhattan to Bronx Park in the Bronx.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Track map of the Manhattan elevated rail network. Source: Electric Railroaders Assn.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge opened and the once sleepy suburb of Brooklyn began to grow into a city in its own right. Taking advantage of the new bridge, the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad opened in 1885, zigzagging from the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, along Myrtle Ave and Grand Ave through Fort Greene and Lexington Ave through Bedford-Stuyvesant (before it was called that), terminating at Broadway and the border of Bushwick. Three years later, the Union Elevated Railroad (UER) built a line along Broadway between Williamsburg and Cypress Hills. The UER also extended a line down Myrtle Ave, connecting all three elevated railroads.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Map of the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad, the first El train in Brooklyn. 1885.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 1888, two additional elevated railroads opened to other parts of Brooklyn. The Kings Co. Elevated Railroad was extended along Fulton St between Fulton Ferry and today\u2019s Broadway Junction, and the 5th Ave Elevated Railroad was extended south along 5th Ave, spurring development in Park Slope, Sunset Park, and Bay Ridge. These elevated lines connected with existing ground level steam railroads that brought riders to Coney Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally, all railroads were powered by steam trains. In the mid 1880s, inventor Frank Sprague<\/a> developed a way for streetcars to be powered by overhead electric wires. The first functional electric streetcar line opened in Richmond, VA in 1887. By 1890, the streetcar network in Boston, MA had converted many of its horse-drawn lines to electricity. By 1903, the New York City streetcars and elevated lines had switched over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the turn of the 20th Century, 40 years of growth had created the first modern mass transit system in the United States. In Manhattan and the Bronx, control over the elevated lines had consolidated into the Manhattan Railway Co. In Brooklyn, the complex network of streetcars, elevated lines, and steam trains headed to Coney Island had been consolidated into the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co. (BRT). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Elevated Subways<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elevated lines can be broken into two types: pre-subway and post-subway. In 1897, the first electric subway operation in the United States started in Boston. New York saw this as the logical next step and contracted the newly formed Interborough Rapid Transit Co. (IRT) to build and run the first subway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pre-subway elevated lines were glorified streetcars in the sky. The cars themselves were made of wood and were relatively light-weight. Elevated cars were longer than streetcars and often had adjustable entrances to allow for low-level boarding or high-level boarding. After conversion to electricity, these trains could run using either third rail power or overhead trolley wire. The low-level cars ran a hybrid elevated-streetcar operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A post shared by New York Regional Infrastructure Group (@subways_io)<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>