Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 1 (1961).pdf/87

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on which could only add to the burden of fixed charges on the road.   Competition of other roads. From the opening of the road in October 1867 to June 1872 the South Side RR enjoyed the advantage of a monopoly of the traffic on the south side and to Rockaway. The first serious inroad into the South Side's prosperity was the opening of the Long Island Railroad's Rockaway Branch in June 1872. Oliver Charlick's route was slightly shorter and more direct, and from Cedarhurst to Far Rockaway exactly paralleled the South Side tracks. After the July 1875 wreck at Lawrence much of the traffic went via the safer Long Island road. With the opening of the Central RR of Long Island in January 1873, the Southern had to compete for the traffic of Hempstead and Babylon. Thus by 1873the South Side could be sure only of the patronage of the smaller south side villages west of Babylon. 

As soon as the receiver took over the management of the South Side RR, he abandoned the Hempstead Branch as an economy measure, the only such part of the South Side system to be sacrificed. On Wednesday evening, April 30, 1879 the last train ran from Hempstead to Valley Stream. The South Side RR's valuable main line, a big money maker because of the summer trade, continued to bear the Southern RR label only until December 1879, when the owners, Drexel, Morgan & Co., reorganized it as the "Brooklyn & Montauk RR," which was then leased to the Long Island RR. Finally, in March 1880, the receiver issued an order erasing the road's identity completely. As of that month, the whole Southern RR was, in the future, to be referred to simply as the Montauk Division of the Long Island RR and so it remains to this day. In October 1889 the Brooklyn & Montauk RR was formally merged into the Long Island RR and the subsequent history of the old road becomes the history of the Long Island R.R.