Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/93

 Operations on the Flushing and North Side completion of these two wires, Queens County achieved telegraphic communication with the outside world for the first time.

The rather desultory and inadequate freight service of the old New York & Flushing R.R. was taken over by the Poppenhusen Judd management and greatly improved. In September 1871 the road chartered the steamer Port Royal to leave New York for Hunter's Point at 4:30 P.M. daily with freight for stations all along the road. The freight was loaded onto a special train at Hunter's Point the same evening. All freight picked up from depots along the road was henceforth delivered in New York at 8 A.M. the next morning. The freight business of the railroad was reported to have increased very rapidly, largely because new business was attracted by the unusual speed of the service.

The period just before and after 1870 was the golden age in New York City of the steam dummy, that curious compromise between the horse-drawn car and the locomotive. The South Side R.R. had pioneered its use in Brooklyn, and the ever-forward looking Flushing & North Side management decided to conduct its own experiments. The Whitestone Branch of the railroad had from the first become the road's main line, thanks to Poppenhusen's and Locke's partiality to their own villages and the location of the shops at College Point. The management, therefore, decided to use steam dummies on the Flushing-Great Neck Branch for all Sunday service (three trips) and to supplement the five daily trips with three dummy runs. The dummy was referred to as the Langdon Steam Car, after the company manufacturing it, and entered service December 1, 1870. At Christmas time the newspapers remarked that "the Langdon steam car's daily supplementary trips scarcely suffice to accommodate the fast-increasing travel. The additional Sunday trips prove a great convenience to the churchgoers." For some reason unknown to us, the Langdon steam car was withdrawn from service before the end of the winter, for it does not appear on the May 1872 timetable. No reason appears in the annual reports of the company, and the newspapers are silent, so we must assume that the operation proved inefficient. The last reference to the car appeared a year later in December 1871, when it was being used to haul ties and rails in the construction of the Central Railroad of Long Island.

It is fitting to make some brief mention of the personalities on