freight north of Stewart Ave. (pre NYA)

Does anyone have and photos during the 80s or 90s of any customer being served up over the trestle. On ArtsArchives there are some wonderful pics, but they are from the late 60s and 70s I believe. Also, does anyone know about when the last freight went over that bridge? The entire Garden City Secondary always fascinated me.

I remember back in the mid to late '80's Alco C420 #224 derailed at the Zeckendorf Blvd. crossing by White Rose over there. There was a picture of it in Newsday. I've tried to find it on-line without success and have inquired about the incident on the LIRR Forum, but nobody seems to recall this derailment. I too would love to see pictures from the '80's & early '90's of the C420's and MP-15ac's working over there.

By the 1990s, I'm pretty sure they were down to the cold storage warehouse on Dibblee Drive, and the LIRR used to leave a reefer parked on the branch (siding was OOS by then, I guess) just south of Zeckendorf.
Just north of Zeckendorf, I recall 2 beat-up Gondolas, that were there for a long time (months? a year?).

Hey, the Cold Storage company still has a web presence:
Foremost Cold Storage of NY, Inc
700 Dibblee Dr
Garden City, New York 11530-2103, USA
tel: +1 5162289480

Lowes has been at that address, what, 8 years now?

Actually, thinking about it, a lot has changed even since the 1980s
Fortunoffs is gone (don't think they used rail Service to that Outlet)
Avis/Cendant is gone, for yet another Mall (don't think they used rail by the 1980s, if at all)
White Rose/Cold Storage is gone, replaced by Lowes Home center
NY State DMV is still there.
MagnaCare - are they still there (big brown curved office)?
NY State Lottery
Pepsi distributor
Verizon - don't ever recall them taking rail service
The chemical firm to the east of Verizon...they didn't take any rail service in the 1990s AFAIIK.

Heck, there weren't really any potential rail freight clients even by the late 1980s

The Lowe's opened in 2002.

I think they got Servoli Foods as the last guy on the branch up to around 1994. LIRR had put out a press release in house showing that costumer being spotted. This was part of their meager attempt to increase business before spinning it off. I have seen pics of the plastic guy towards end of the branch taking pellet hoppers.(Endo?)

freightguy wrote:I think they got Servoli Foods as the last guy on the branch up to around 1994. LIRR had put out a press release in house showing that costumer being spotted. This was part of their meager attempt to increase business before spinning it off. I have seen pics of the plastic guy towards end of the branch taking pellet hoppers.(Endo?)

Those two customers were south of Stewart Avenue (if just by a block or so); IIRC, the plastics firm at the end of the Garden City Branch (at Endo - well, at least end of track by the 1990s was Endo) was Continental Extrusion, which usually had a decent number of Covered Hoppers - I think it became a clothes outlet center by 1993/1994? Servoli Foods, did they ever get rail service in the 1990s - I know their siding was rebuilt - I know the Oak St crossing was redone at least, but I don't recall them ever getting service (and they wouldn't because of the freight moratorium under NY&A). There was for a while a brisk business in intermodal shipments of ash/waste from RefFuels at the "Garden City Intermodal Yard" during the early 1990s, but again this was south of Stewart.
I recall some cabooses parked by the Bus Depot entrance for the longest time in the mid-1990s - I guess those pieces went on to the RMLI?

The cabooses were part of the collection of Friends of 35, not RMLI. Most if not all of the equipment was moved to Oyster Bay.

When i worked at the DMV Garden city office in 1994/'95 the tracks going behind that building on Axxinn Avenue were impassable and interrupted - although there was traces of the rails going accross the street to where Avis was at the time. The freight lines over there seemed to have been abandoned for a long time already.

railfan365 wrote:When i worked at the DMV Garden city office in 1994/'95 the tracks going behind that building on Axxinn Avenue were impassable and interrupted - although there was traces of the rails going accross the street to where Avis was at the time. The freight lines over there seemed to have been abandoned for a long time already.

As I may have mentioned, I worked in the area in the 1990s, and so a lot of that branch - unfortunately, by the mid-1990s there were small trees between the tracks in the section that curves NE around the Magnacare parking lot, and large trees (and disconnect/heaved-up rail) in the section alongside the south of Avis/Cendant's parking lot (along the way to the Chemical Firm).
Looking at the 1966 Historic Aerial view, which is a bit unclear, even by 1966 it looks as if the chemical company wasn't using rail freight (and Avis and Verizon...er, NYNEX...er NY Telephone had no need of rail freight at those locations - if NY Telephone had a gondola of poles or cable reels or whatever, shipped by rail, they would have probably off-loaded at the nearby Garden City team track.
I do recall in 1991 (1990 at the earliest), watching a track test car (Sperry, I think) traverse up the MagnaCare curve, and come back south - maybe that was the last piece of rail equipment to traverse that curve. South of the curve, alongside the future site of the NY DMV, was a run-around track.
Again, looking at the 1966 aerial, looks like the only two active customers north of the Meadowbrook was White Rose and whatever was in the erstwhile Fortunoff Outdoor outlet - I don't see any other active-looking sidings in those images.