Similar But Not

I was in Rockaway last week, and getting there is one of the weirder subway rides you can take. The A train is going along normally underground, then it becomes an el, and then you’re on a causeway over Jamaica Bay headed to the Rockaway peninsula. In any case, here’s what the elevated structure looks like in Rockaway:

That looks nothing like normal New York elevated transit structures, which are typically riveted, built-up steel. What gives? The answer, as always with that question, is individual history. From the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, much of the peninsula was effectively a beach resort with only summer occupancy. There were a lot of little unheated, uninsulated wooden cottages for summer use, unlike the grand hotels in Brooklyn, in Coney Island and Brighton Beach. Just as there were a bunch of railroads constructed to take people from the cities of New York and Brooklyn down to Coney and Brighton, there were two railroads built to get people to Rockaway: the South Side Railroad opened a line from Brooklyn to Far Rockaway, curving around the north and east sides of Jamaica Bay in 1869, and the New York, Woodhaven and Rockaway Railroad built the causeway in 1887, providing significantly faster trips and service to Broad Channel, a little maritime community on an island in the bay. Both of those railroads were absorbed into the Long Island Railroad empire before the 1900. The causeway branch was electrified in 1905 and temporarily closed in 1950 after a fire destroyed part of the trestle. The railroad sold it to the city and it reopened as a branch of the A train in 1956.

Regular railroad construction is always heavier than subway construction. Every branch of the LIRR carries or has carried freight, and the standards for loading were simply greater. And the railroads around New York sometimes preferred reinforced-concrete construction to steel for long elevated stretches – for example, the LIRR main line has elevated concrete portions just east of the Queens borough line. So this el doesn’t look like an el because it originally wasn’t.