Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/152

 136 promise. In return for forfeiting her claim for $90,000 for rental of the Stewart road, Sharpe agreed to run at least seven trains each way daily through Garden City.

Convinced that the Central R.R. could not, and never would, earn its expenses, Col. Sharpe, as part of his economy drive, announced the abandonment of another large slice of the road, this time from Central Junction in Flushing to Creedmoor as of May 1, 1879. Then, on July 9, 1879, the million-dollar first mortgage on the Central was foreclosed, with interest since March 1877. The company's entire property was put up for sale, excepting the sixteen miles of the Stewart-owned portion, the lease of which was to go with the sale. As might be expected, the sole bidders at the sale were two agents of Drexel, Morgan & Co., who bid in the property for $50,000, part of which was payable in the bonds and coupons of the road, and the majority of which they already owned. In mid-October Receiver Sharpe notified the residents along the route that the rails would be torn up and all the depots and trackwalkers' houses removed. This action destroyed about five miles of the old Central right-of-way; the little one-mile stub north of the Long Island R.R. main line track that terminated at Creedmoor was left intact because of heavy annual military traffic to the Rifle Range. All that was now operated of the former extensive Central road was the stretch from Floral Park to Garden City and the branch into Hempstead; sixteen miles of road eastward to Babylon lay unused and weedgrown, but physically intact.

We must now turn our attention to the North Side road, set adrift to get along as best it could after the dissolution of the system by the courts. The North Shore section, extending from Flushing to Great Neck, built as a separate road in 1866, and operated all these years by the Flushing & North Side under lease, was foreclosed by the bondholders in September 1880, and Thomas Messenger, president of the Queens County Bank in Flushing, was appointed receiver for the road, taking possession as of December 1. Three months later the Flushing & North Side R.R. was itself foreclosed and sold at auction December 11, 1880. Again, predictably, the road was bought in by Drexel, Morgan & Co.

Meanwhile, other important changes were taking place on the Long Island R.R. itself. Drexel, Morgan & Co. was ap-