LIRR History: Patchogue -> Montauk abandonment filing

I was poking around the NY Times archive and came across this topic, which I suspect has long been forgotten (?). I certainly haven't heard of it before...

It seems in 1953, The bankrupt LIRR wanted to abandon this route. The NYT article is pretty long, explaining that they thought they could save $450,000 a year on it, and just 2% of their freight ran on this segment, and 140 commuters (I assume per day).

The article is here - http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h ... 8388649EDE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Not sure the link will work so here's the title too: "L. I. R. R. FILES TO END MONTAUK BRANCH; Trustee Says Main Line Could Handle Traffic -- 62-Mile Unit Called Money Loser L.I.R.R. FILES TO END MONTAUK BRANCH"

Obviously this never happened, for one reason or another. What's the daily ridership out there now? I'm assuming much more just from the yearly summer crowding complaints about the cannonball I've read here... (freight's down to 0%)

How the times change...

a couple years ago at the clark NJ train show there was a guy selling multiple copies of the montauk branch abandonment study, they were slightly out of my price range (if i recall he wanted sixty bucks a pop for them) but i do regret not grabbing one, probably some very interesting information in there.

Ridership of course today is a lot higher than it was back then due to urban sprawl, but interesting that their plan was for commuters to use the Main Line as an alternative. Today, it would be more likely to abandon the Main Line due to non-existant ridership.