Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/127

 The Heyday of the Poppenhusens railroad over $2,000 in passenger revenue. On Sundays during 1875 the road was using seven and eight car trains all day to accommodate the Sunday excursionists.

Charter outings added their share to the company's revenues. When Garden City was first opened to the public by A. T. Stewart in 1874 for the rental of homes and farms, special trains ran every Sunday in September and October to accommodate prosspective buyers. The well-known real estate promoter, Benjamin Hitchcock, also chartered trains on occasional Sundays to transport 300 or 400 people to visit his Flushing Park development and buy lots. In September of 1875 the wealthy Mickle family of Bayside chartered a train to enable wedding guests from the city to witness the marriage of their daughter. The North Side tracks ran through their estate and their gardeners fashioned a temporary station on the grounds for the guests.

Next to College Point, the heaviest excursion traffic was to the Creedmoor Rifle Range. Conrad Poppenhusen had generously donated the land for the range to the National Rifle Association, and Creedmoor soon became the site for international competitions, as well as the practice range for the local National Guard units. Creedmoor was graded by the railroad crews and formally opened in June 1873. Every fall thereafter for many years trainloads of private shooting societies and entire National Guard units traveled to Creedmoor for meets and practice sessions. It was not uncommon to schedule train-loads of 1,000 men and more on a Sunday.

Next to passenger traffic in production of revenue came the freight traffic of the road. The Flushing & North Side R.R. originally had only its passenger dock at Hunter's Point for freight movement, but the authorities at the Point would not permit the handling of manure, the product most in demand by Long Island farmers. In the summer of 1873 the Central R.R. built a spur from Central Junction across the creek and over the meadows to Flushing Bay and then out into the water. It seems highly probable that the railroad simply took over an abandoned steamboat dock, constructed in 1855, to lure excursionists to Yonkers Island, a scheme which had fallen through. The dock must have been opened in the spring of 1873, for the Flushing Journal commented that its presence had made the shipping on Flushing Bay very active, and that all summer long it had been