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The Coming of the Iron Horse

Railroad investors use Long Island as a rail-sea shortcut to Boston -- but suddenly lose their market to competition

By Sidney C. Schaer | Staff Writer

To some, the idea seemed like an impossible dream.

Travelers who wanted to go from New York to Boston would no longer have to devote a minimum of 16 hours by steamer, or several days aboard an out-of-date 5-mph stagecoach. Instead, they would have breakfast in New York and get to Boston in just 11 hours, in time for supper.

The idea was for them to go by way of Long Island. Mostly by train.

As the plan was envisioned in 1834, passengers from Manhattan would catch the South Ferry to Brooklyn, where a train would take them 96 miles across the wilds of Long Island all the way to Greenport. There, a steamboat would ferry them across Long Island Sound to Stonington, Conn. In Stonington, a New York, Providence & Boston Co. train would be waiting to carry them to Boston.

The idea may have seemed simple, but it took 10 years to achieve.

Delayed by a national economic crisis in 1837 and by nervous investors wary of a new, untested technology, by competing interests and a shortage of funds, the Long Island Rail Road finally rumbled toward its destiny in the summer of 1844.

The LIRR's founders had hoped to tie the completion of the main line to the celebration of Independence Day, 1844. Instead, they had to settle for a later date to link Long Island's two extremities by rail. On Saturday, July 27, three trainloads of celebrants departed from Brooklyn at 8 a.m., and traveled at an average of 30 mph nonstop to Greenport - the first train arriving in an unheard-of three hours and 45 minutes.

It was still an era of lyrical prose even if life was beginning to speed up and the correspondent for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle - who was among the 500 celebrants gathered in Greenport to mark the railroad's completion - described the trip this way: ``The interior of old Suffolk, which until that day, has been sacred to the gambols of wild deer ... has been disturbed only by the sharp crack of the huntsman's rifle, or the low rumble of the village coach as it plodded on at the rate of five miles an hour was saluted for the first time by the shrill whistle of the locomotive; and the iron horse with its lungs of brass and sinews of steel, came dashing along at a furious rate, puffing volumes of smoke and flame from its nostrils, and warning the people, who gazed in astonishment that . . . the prediction of the seers and prophets like [Robert] Fulton was accomplished.''

Leading the contingent of train riders to Greenport was the railroad's fourth president, George B. Fisk. Accounts of the day reported that James Sprague, mayor of Brooklyn, made the trip, and the mayor of New York was invited but was not on the train. Champagne and hyperbole flowed in Greenport that Saturday. John A. King of Jamaica, who would become New York's first Whig governor and was a founder of the LIRR's precursor, the 11-mile-long Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad, toasted the occasion with champagne, saying, ``Railroads and steam engines, the Promethean inventions of modern days.'' Another speaker, John McCoun, perhaps spoke more about the meaning of what had been accomplished: ``The eastern extremity of Long Island, this day made a neighbor of New York and Brooklyn.''

Preston Raynor, a young man at the time, would write down his recollections years later in 1917. He had grown up in a house in Manorville near the place where the railroad made one of its two refueling stops. On the big day, Raynor worked with others cutting wood to fuel the train's locomotive. His brother Edgar crowded aboard the first or second train for the ride to Greenport. But Raynor's group, hoping to grab a space on the last of the three trains, missed out.

``When the third train came, it did not stop and I with the others got left,'' he reported. ``That was the first and only train that did not stop at Manorville for the next 14 years.''

The refueling stop put Manorville - once called Punk's Hole, or the Manor of St. George - on the map, and historian Nathaniel Prime, writing in 1845, still found it amazing: ``Had a man, 30 years ago, ventured to predict that this spot was destined to become a daily stopping place for the refreshment of hundreds of travelers between New York and Boston, he would have been considered a madman, and possibly might have been bound with cords, for fear he might do injury.''

Two days later, regular service began, and by August the profitable Boston route was operating.

An impossible dream had been realized. But in three short years a faster route that would take travelers all the way to Boston by train would make the LIRR's original purpose both obsolete and irrelevant.

Instead of being a long-distance hauler, the LIRR would be forced to look to Long Island for its business - traversing a route that would come to haunt its founders.

* * * The Long Island Rail Road was organized at the dawn of the age of railroading. It was the seventh railroad chartered in the United States - conceived less than a decade after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which made New York City the region's pre-eminent port. Other cities on the East Coast had to cope with ``Erie Fever'' and one solution was a new transportation technology pioneered in England - the steam locomotive. In the first half of the 19th Century, railroads would gradually supplant canals, as it became apparent that they weren't subject to winter shutdowns.

By 1832, when the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad was begun, there were only 229 miles of track laid throughout the country. Because the technology of railroad building was still in its infancy, straight, flat routes were preferred. The route through Connecticut seemed unthinkable in the 1830s because of hilly terrain and because major rivers would need to be crossed. It was in this period that the Long Island Rail Road Co. was born. The route went straight through the Island's undeveloped center. It was a civil engineer's dream.

``It is entirely free from navigable rivers, without a bridge for a hundred miles and with grades of an average of less than 10 feet per mile, having six curves only in 80 miles, and with its eastern termination in one of the most beautiful harbors to the ocean,'' the railroad's engineer, James J. Shipman, wrote in a report to the board of directors.

Maj. David B. Douglass, the chief civil engineer of the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad, who was hired as a consultant for the new line, was equally encouraging: ``... The public mind is quite familiar with speeds of 20-30 miles per hour and numerous locomotives in various parts of our country are wheeling daily over their respective tracks, at these rates, without a murmur of alarm or disapprobation ... only eleven and one half hours will be required for the entire journey from New York, or Brooklyn to Boston.''

The route began at water's edge in Brooklyn, at Atlantic Street (now Atlantic Avenue), and moved along an 11-mile right-of-way that extended from the village of Brooklyn through what it is now East New York, then crossed into Queens near the Union Race Course and continued to Jamaica.