The New York & Brooklyn Bridge Railway

By

The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, predating the adoption of the automobile by several decades. As such, it was originally envisioned as a bridge to transport horse-drawn carriages, trains and trolleys. The latter of which was carried over the bridge until 1950. 


Today, pedestrians, bikes and cars use the bridge, and it remains a major tourist attraction for the city. 

"Bird's-Eye View of the Great New York and Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Display of Fire Works on Opening Night" (1883)

The New York and Brooklyn Bridge Railway, a cable car service, began operations in 1883, shortly after the bridge itself opened. It ran on the inner lanes of the bridge, between terminals at the Manhattan and Brooklyn ends.


Harper's Weekly, 10/12/1895, "The erection of a new terminal at the New York end of the Brooklyn Bridge is a task of far greater difficulty than the erection of the one on the Brooklyn side. In Brooklyn a new station was built directly across the street from the old station. In New York the new station is being built on the site of the old one. The extraordinary care necessary in tearing down the old building, the use of a great deal of the iron-work of the old station in the new, the building of a complete false-work structure for the trains to run on, have delayed the progress of the work, and will so delay it that it is probable that the station will not be completed fully until some time next summer. The first change of importance in the New York terminal has been to raise the tracks one story in the station. This was necessary to provide new stairways for the people. It obviated cutting into the masonry of the bridge structure and the consequent weakening of that. The next important change was to move the platforms further toward Brooklyn. This was done to give room for the switching of the trains entirely beyond the platforms, thus destroying any probability of serious accident to the passengers in shifting the cars. The new station will have two "island platforms." One will be the incoming platform and the other will be the outgoing Trains coming from Brooklyn will go to alternate sides of the incoming platform as they arrive, and trains going to Brooklyn will leave the outgoing platform in the same manner. There will be double tracks, called "sandwiched" tracks, across the bridge, and any given train will remain on one continuous track in making the round trip. The new station will be 521 feet long and 87 feet 6 inches wide. The platforms will be 230 feet long and 20 feet wide. The old platforms were only 100 feet long, and 8 feet wide. Trains will be run under a headway of forty-five seconds instead of ninety as now, and the train capacity will be fully 500,000 passengers a day in time of a crush."


"To cross Brooklyn Bridge there were special train shuttles that gripped a cable driven by a static steam engine and were then moved to the other track by a steam locomotive for the next departure (1883-1908)" Funimag on Twitter.

When Brooklyn and New York City unified in 1898, this company was absorbed by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT). Shortly thereafter, trolleys began to run on the bridge along the roadway.


This 1899 video shows some very early rail operations on the Brooklyn Bridge, the last of which ended in 1950. Afterwards, the bridge was redesigned completely to accommodate only vehicular and walking traffic.


 Thomas A. Edison, Inc.: "New Brooklyn to New York Via Brooklyn Bridge", 1899

Today, there's hardly any indication that anything besides automobiles and pedestrians ever used the bridge, but that speaks to how much conversion has been undertaken along its path.

Walking along the very crowded Brooklyn Bridge. FRRandP photo, 2018.

Thanks as always for reading!
Location: Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, New York, NY 10038, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Find, Trace and Share Abandoned Railroad Corridors Near You! (Updated April 2022)

By
Image
Our Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines Map of lines across the world has gotten a ton of views and support from people across all sorts of interests and knowledge bases. For that, I thank you! But I never really explained how  I came to find all of these lines. So with that in mind, today's blog is going to go over how to use Google My Maps to create your own maps for people to find and view and criticize.  This blog is essentially my love letter to My Maps, as the platform has (thankfully) remained a part of the Google Suite, and I sincerely hope it never goes the way of Google Fusion Tables. Of course, the magic of Google My Maps is that you can create maps of pretty much anything, without having to learn incredibly complex GIS systems and selling your soul to ESRI for a license to use ArcGIS. Google My Maps is incredibly intuitive for building vector data (points, lines and polygons), and to this day, when I am building vector maps for use in ArcGIS, I will often u
Read more

The 10 Most Pointless 3-digit Interstate Highways

By
Image
The Interstate Highway System is a marvel of engineering, even in spite of its cost. There are over 46,000 interstate miles in the US. Surely, not all of them are necessary. Some can even be considered pointless. A 1958 map of what was completed of the original interstate highway act, which has since been added upon in a significant way. Image: WTTW What makes a highway pointless, especially one built to the highest road standards in the world? It can be length, as many of these routes are only a mile or two in length, but it doesn't have to be. There are quite useful interstate highways that nonetheless very short (I-190 in Illinois and I-238 in California are good examples). Another qualification is the area they serve; many of these routes either don't connect to a significantly populated area, or don't facilitate downtown traffic. And while some of them most certainly do fulfill these criteria; they could do so without being labeled as an Interstate Highway.
Read more

The Abandoned Railroad Map of Washington State

By
Image
As we've done for the States of Illinois , Rhode Island and Florida , we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington. Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data. Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map , and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog , who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in
Read more