LONG BEACH BRANCH??

For some reason, several residents of the Island Park, Oceanside area are insisting that Lowes Hardware plans on putting a distribution center in Island Park on the site formerly occupied by Gulf Oil and currently occupied by a few freeloaders. It is rumored that rail access is a key part of this planned sight and that people currently occupying the land have been given notice to vacate.

I believe this is the area just east of MP20 and west of Hog Creek off of Long Beach #2 Trk as shown on the following map borrowed from trainsarefun.com



Does anyone know about this??

Sounds like that's going to be an interesting place.

Take It Easy Knife!! I just got one branch delisted from th PC now you want to add another?!! Can't you wait one more week?

On this site are any spurs still in
existence, or would any rail
access via the Long Beach Branch
be newly constructed? If this is true
we'll be seeing more boxcars, flatcars
and maybe tankcars with LPG....When
was freight last seen on the L.B.
branch?

I'm working at the powerplant across the tracks from the old Gulf site. They have been loading barges with dirt from there. Must be contaminated soil from the oil tanks. I've seen at least 6 barges so far this week.

Mike

I believe the last freight service on the branch was a coal train for the above mentioned powerplant. I know NYAR has talked to other folks along the branch, C&D Scrap and Food Supply but have heard nothing concrete.

Do these other potential customers have spurs already that would just have to be repaired or reconnected to the main trackage of the L.B. Branch?

Would the LIRR give NYA a hard time about restoring freight service on this branch, or would they do whatever they needed to do to help NYA?

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem....

I went down to the old Gulf Oil Property and saw the digging going on by the water. Unfortunately there is no evidence of any past spur or switch which only lessens the likelihood of a future siding.

There is plenty of property down in that area, with various vehicles parked/abandoned there. I saw three or four scrap companies and of course a school bus lot. Has anyone else ever noticed that these school bus lots seem to pop up on old railroad sidings???? From the bridge at Daly Blvd I looked in both directions and saw no evidence of ANY sidings....oh well a boy can dream can't he......?

Well... if the head cheeses are anything like the people who run the garbage business on the island, I think they will get what they want *cough*

I am an Oceanside resident and have heard nothing of this rumor. We get a lot of crazy rumors around here. For example, a few years ago after the owner of a local garden center tore down a house next to his story, there were rumors that a drug rehab facility was to be erected on the site. What nonsense (the business owner wanted to expand his business.)!

Take away the question of rail service for a moment and the location makes no sense for a distribution facility for Lowes because it is not central to Lowes' stores on the Island; the nearest one is in Carle Place. Second, truck access to Oceanside/Island Park is terrible. All routes involve use of narrow, crowded streets that make it difficult to get tractor trailers in and out, and you are talking about at least 10 miles on local roads to reach the Long Island Expressway.

Rest assured, a proposal like this would meet strong local opposition, and I would be part of that opposition.

As for rail service, I'm not sure how good a deal this would be for NY&A. Lowes would be the only customer on the branch. Serving the siding in conjunction with a run on the Montauk branch would involve a time-consuming back-up move to/from Valley Stream.

In short, don't get your hopes up, boys. If you want to see freight on the Long Beach branch, you'll have to find a picture of a South Side Extra. (Wish I had my camera in those days.)

LI Loco wrote:Take away the question of rail service for a moment and the location makes no sense for a distribution facility for Lowes because it is not central to Lowes' stores on the Island; the nearest one is in Carle Place. Second, truck access to Oceanside/Island Park is terrible. All routes involve use of narrow, crowded streets that make it difficult to get tractor trailers in and out, and you are talking about at least 10 miles on local roads to reach the Long Island Expressway.

I'd agree that this would not be the ideal location for Lowes - now, if you said they plan to open a Home Center (a retail outlet, which couldn't efficently use rail service) then I'd would believe it, as Pergements did a pretty decent business a few blocks away until the entire chain closed (along with Rickels and Channels), due in large part to Home Depot (hmm, I forgot, is there a Home Depot in those nearby huge Big box strips centers on Long Beach Road? Across from the one with the Kohls?)

As for rail service, I'm not sure how good a deal this would be for NY&A. Lowes would be the only customer on the branch. Serving the siding in conjunction with a run on the Montauk branch would involve a time-consuming back-up move to/from Valley Stream.

Well, if they had to run a freight down to this proposed center anyway, perhaps they could justify a better price to the scrap yards, cement distributor and other businesses.

Speaking of Bus lots, there have been several lining Lawson for decades (I remember at least two, one on each side of Lawson since the 1980s). I don't remember if it's still there since they built that Townhouse development on Daly between Long Beach and Lawson over 15? years ago, but there was a large, well, collecting pool (it had squared off sides, so perhaps it was a manmade lake) that had a large square pennisular sticking into it from the direction of Lawson, and this land was always cover with what seemed like hundreds of shiny yellow school buses (probably only a few dozen, but it seemed a lot). It always reminded me of a 'local' version of the huge bus lot on the Hutchison River by Co-op city (which did have hundreds and hundreds of buses).

As a kid, I was always kinda disappointed when my dad would take me along (to Pergaments or the OTB on Lawson), and I saw the Long Beach line with several promising industries along side of it, but no freight cars - this was before I grasped the concepts of economics, corruption, NIMBYism, and just plain stupidity (culminating in the horrifying knowledge that the LIRR was activitely chasing away freight business in the 1970s on the concept that they wouldn't have to follow FRA oversight due to not being an interstate agency or some such nonsense - I have seen this mentioned in print, but right now on-line searches have been fruitless )

Sir Ray:

In its heyday, there were at least a half dozen freight spurs on the Long Beach branch besides the LILCO plant, which received coal trains at least 2x/wk. However, I believe the freight customers on the line went away as a result of what I will call "natural causes." They were mainly small businesses that either could no longer compete or the products and quanitities they received by rail could be handled more economically either by truck or by a combination of rail and truck from a transhipment center.

Although there are many small scrap yards in the area, I don't know where they ship their "junk" to. Most likely the distance isn't far enough to make rail attractive, however. Even the huge scrap yard on the LIRR mainline near Medford isn't using rail.

The scrap yard on the main in Medford does use rail. One of RS 60's biggest customers. This site also used rail with the LIRR.

LI Loco wrote:Sir Ray:
In its heyday, there were at least a half dozen freight spurs on the Long Beach branch besides the LILCO plant, which received coal trains at least 2x/wk. However, I believe the freight customers on the line went away as a result of what I will call "natural causes." They were mainly small businesses that either could no longer compete or the products and quanitities they received by rail could be handled more economically either by truck or by a combination of rail and truck from a transhipment center.

Yes, I know that now - every so often I have come across LIRR track layouts of various areas online (similar to the one at the top of the page), but for some reason forget to bookmark them - anyway, for areas such as Williston Park or Garden City you can see the high-density of trackage, many serving business types long gone (such as coal dealers - I have read that in some areas of NE Pennsylvania near Scranton some home owners still heat with coal, but I think their they only ones), or converted to retail (such as Country Glen Plaza and environs in Carle Place where the MainLine crosses Glen Cove Rd - for years you could trace the branch off the main curve past the P.C. Richards on Voice Rd, and then where it turned east and abutted the building on the north side of Voice Rd, whose loading docks had been converted into discount Store fronts).
However, I didn't realise this in the 70s and 80s, when railfreight was hitting all time lows on Long Island (and maybe the rest of the Northeast too), and was irked as a kid seeing facilities such as scrapyards that, on model railroads my frame of reference then) would be prime rail freight generators (course, in real life these sites might generate say 2 semi-loads a week, or say half an gondola, but that's simply not model railroad economics ).
Things did pick up in the early 90s, when the MTA stopped saying "Freight Bad!", and introduced some programs to increase rail usage (unfortunately, some of them like the intermodal bogies, are best not discussed), culminating in the award of freight haulage to NY&A.

Sir Ray Gershow scrap yard now generates at least 13 cars a day. They increased their capacity when they added a second track.