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| Re: Pitken Avenue And 76th Street (1036602) | |||
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Re: Pitken Avenue And 76th Street |
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Posted by SilverFox on Sun Feb 13 20:12:34 2011, in response to Pitken Avenue And 76th Street, posted by Union Turnpike on Sat Feb 12 20:39:58 2011. The following is from several posts I have made on the matter in 2007, along with some additional updates based upon recently-discussed "what if" projects:That four-track line was to be a tri-county cooperative effort to bring local subway service to Montauk Point along the south shore of Long Island. Reports have had it that there was actually an IND-style subway built during the 1930s that supposedly linked the Hamptons and Montauk, and maybe ran as far west as Shirley. Unfortunately, funding dried up due to World War II and this line, with completed stations and fixtures, was first orphaned and then sealed and backfilled, never having run a train. The Queens portion was to run past Euclid Avenue with stops at 76th Street (where there exists a full station with ample evidence of its existence and several R-9 cars modified for running along this mega-line that were forgotten after testing and trapped by the backfilling that later occurred), Cross Bay Boulevard, Van Wyck Expressway/Kennedy Airport, 150th Street, Farmers Boulevard, North Hangar Road, Rockaway Blvd, Sunrise Highway/Laurelton Expressway, and Hook Creek Boulevard. To avoid jurisdictional issues, the tracks ended at a "sliding table track" able to shift entire trains and their passengers onto an adjoining set of Nassau County rails that began at the Queens/Nassau border, where newly-appointed motormen and conductors from the new MTA Nassau Subway division would take over until a similar arrangement was reached at the Suffolk Border, where -- you guessed it! -- MTA Suffolk Subway crewmembers would pilot the train to Montauk with maybe a crew change in Shirley. The loamy sand and soil of Long Island lends itself to tunneling on the cheap and fast. And the concrete was to be mixed from the garnet and lodestone sands of Fire Island specially dredged for this project, giving the walls and platforms a nice reddish-brick tinge and controlling all manner of bacterial and mold growth due to the sand's high salt content. Plans were also afoot to extend the line under Long Island Sound to Southeastern Connecticut or Rhode Island, Nantucket, Cape Cod, and Portland, Maine, before continuing north to Eastern Canada, Nova Scotia, and the rest of the Maritime Provinces, making the line a truly "International Express." Recently, on the Discovery Channel, they were discussing whether or not a transoceanic tunnel was feasible, traversing the Atlantic Ocean from somewhere in North America to Europe. In my mind, for such a project to have viability, it would have to traverse a minimum of water and hit as many populated land points across it as possible, or areas that have the potential to sustain large populations. I could see the line extending from easternmost Canada, touching land at Greenland and Iceland, and then heading south through Scotland to England, to London, before connecting to the Eurostar Chunnel for onward service to France and the rest of Europe. Imagine Reykjavik, Iceland, Goose Bay, Labrador, Gander, Newfoundland, and other now-godforsaken, desolate barrens becoming cosmopolitan population centers! While this may seem very far-fetched, remember that in the 1930s, the subway was basically THE mode of transportation in the City and there was still a great deal of pro-subway sentiment. Had the Eastern section and the Queens section been connected and the line to Montauk operated as planned, Mayors and Governors from the cities and states along the proposed route extension would have had enough time to evaluate the positive effect the Montauk Subway Route would have generated for our region, making them amenable to kicking in the untold billions necessary in order to gain a piece of the pie. True, there were the Pennsylvania, Penn Central, New Haven, and other railroads operating at the time more suited to the task of long distance travel, however the subway was very local in scope and was designed for constant stops every 1500 or so feet so as to spur greater development along its right-of-way, which is what the politicians wanted to see. They weren't planning on having someone ride from Wakefield to Halifax on $2.00 as much as taking local residents a few miles out of their center point on a rolling basis, creating a slightly broader catchment area for merchants along the route. Should that route have begun its cross-sound trek today, I am sure Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun would have paid for a spur going straight into their casino floor, thereby amortizing the cost to the government jurisdictions through which the right-of-way would have originally passed. Everybody would have won. But today, it takes a bridge nearly 20 years to be painted. Oh well. Not only were the civilian governments along the right-of-way keenly interested in public transport through their jurisdictions, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was champing at the bit over the prospects of using all that excavated sand, silt, and rock from the cross-Sound tunnel project to build an archipelago of artificial islands similar to those used in the building of the Rockaway Line in order to create enough isolated land for top-secret military projects as well as anchorages for the much-talked-about cross-Sound automobile bridge project from Orient and/or Montauk Point to southern New England. It is such a perfect symbiotic mesh: The tunnel would be built to accommodate rolling and continuous short-stretch traffic while the byproducts of its construction would be used to provide more land and better transportation options for those wishing to travel longer distances. The surface facet need not even include a bridge. It could remain at surface level about ten or so feet above sea level and include lanes for automobiles, commercial traffic, and even LIRR tracks taking trains into an intermodal (bus/boat/rail) transportation terminal somewhere along the New England coastline, streamlining transportation efficiency better than the patchwork system in place now. Anybody with half a mind's interest in the geography and politics of the region could see this: There were clues scattered about that had to come together some way. Euclid Avenue's tracks extended past 76th Street to be connected to a line that went to at least the City Line. The East End (Long Island) Subway was built in anticipation of the Queens line's eastward march to eventually meet it in Shirley after jurisdictional issues were ironed out. The best way to fund an overwater bridge requiring tons and tons of fill for anchorages is to build something that produces fill -- like a tunnel -- which reduces overall costs of both projects. After all, waste not, want not. A side benefit is additional land for other uses beside bridge anchorages; in this case, military experiments. Since the line past 76th Street was never built, the East End Line became vestigial and too sparsely populated to offer any return on running trains on it, the cross-Sound tunnel plans were abandoned, and to this day we have no cross-Sound bridge. Imagine . . . Inwood to Paris, France and beyond for $2.50. And the lack of a 76th Street station is what prevented that dream from occurring. |
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