Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/47

 The Flushing R. R. Goes Down Hill return home early to Flushing. In the summer season of 1862 ten trips a day were run each way, and in addition, charter service was made available at a minimum fee of $6 including ferriage. In the 1862 season the managers astounded the public with the announcement that on and after May 5 all commutation would be abolished altogether; that a flat rate of 10¢ a trip would be charged from Flushing, West Flushing, Newtown and Winfield stations to Hunter's Point; that packages of tickets of eleven for $1 would be available, and that a reduction of 50% would be made in the freight rates. The editor of the Flushing Journal amusingly eulogized the disappearanc eof the commuters as a class. He wrote: "There is to be no commutation at all; passengers will be upon an equality, and as democratic as democracy can make them. The commuters who are thus placed hors de combat were a most interesting class and will be missed. Their pleasantries, their growlings, their exclusive privileges of finding fault with everything that ran counter to their feelings for the time being—and all their agreeable and disagreeable peculiarities have been swept away at a jerk by the broom of reform."

In the 1863 season the low rates continued and we see the revival of an excursion service; on Thanksgiving Day of that year trips were run hourly from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. In the spring of 1864 the Sunday service was again restored, this time for good. Many influential persons still strongly disapproved of the idea on moral grounds, but there was now the excuse of the war, and an increase in the number of riders. The strict Sabbatarianism of an earlier day was less in harmony now with the quickened national life, and proximity to the polyglot metropolis of New York tempered and softened the stricter moral climate of the suburbs. On May 1, 1864 five Sunday trains began running each way between Flushing and Hunter's Point with the fare set at 15¢.

It is during the years of the Civil War and its aftermath that we can first observe the gradual decline in the level of maintenance of the Flushing R.R. and in the service provided. The first inkling that all was not well appeared in December of 1861, at a time when the excitement over Fort Sumter and Bull Run was still new and fresh in the public mind. A regular rider indicted the road for old, dirty and unsafe cars, insufficient