Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/33

 The Flushing R.R.'s Early Years storm highlighted this unsettled traffic interchange arrangement.

The local newspaper, in printing the just complaints of the riders, stoutly defended the road in doing all in its power and at great expense to keep the track open with armies of men and plows, but censured the company for letting the situation at Hunter's Point deteriorate to the point where passengers were abandoned at the water's edge, or else forced to pay an overcharge.

The following January (1857), the moment the ice blocked navigation in the East River, the Flushing R.R. put on a line of omnibuses between Hunter's Point and Peck Slip Ferry at the foot of Broadway, Brooklyn, to convey passengers from their trains. The experiences of 1856 had taught the company an expensive lesson. The winter of 1856, severe as it had been, proved hardly more than a prelude to the storms of January 1857. The winter of this year has passed into history as being, if not the most severe of the nineteenth century on Long Island, then at least in second or third place. On Sunday, January 18 the thermometer plunged to the zero mark and not long after, the snow began to fall, the flakes whipped and driven by gale-force winds. One by one, the streets of the city were choked with snow and the great steam roads leading out of the metropolis stiffened to a halt. On the eastern end of Long Island, Great South Bay froze over solid, and from the beaches great chunks of ice extended seaward as far as the eye could peer. Village life in Queens came to a complete halt and the L.I.R.R. stopped running for a week. Again the Flushing R.R. disappeared under mountainous drifts of snow, and again the superintendent gathered an army of 100 snow shovelers who dug their way west from Flushing. The trackman, with a force of seventy-five men of his own, began operations at Hunter's Point and at 9 A.M. on Wednesday, the twenty-first, effected a junction. That day the 4 P.M. train made the scheduled trip and found several passengers huddled in one of the coaches at Hunter's Point who had spent the night in the car. Once again the ferry boats were out of service; the East River, for the first time in many years, had frozen over solid from shore to shore and venturesome persons were crossing on the ice. When the train attempted to return to Flushing, it became wedged in a drift at West Flushing and had to be dug out by a rescue train. Service remained disorganized