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The years that I am referring to are basically the 1950's and early 1960's. I remember climbing the stairs near the tennis club with my mother to catch an east-bound train so that she could shop at Gertz in Jamaica, using the Union Hall Street Station. I can recall the Tuscan red coaches. And once, ...

Forest Hills and Kew Gardens have not always had short platforms. When I was a youngster, the east-bound platform extended much farther west toward the tennis club and their was a staircase from the sidewalk to the extreme west end of that platform. The west-bound platform extended much farther east...

And, as luck would have it, there are signal problems in Queens Interlocking. The scanner has been going crazy all afternoon with Queens trying to route trains in and out of the Belmont spur.

I was aboard the last train through Whitepot ( we natives used to call it Whitepot Junction) on June 8, 1962. "Whitepot" is the pre-real estate name of Forest Hills. Until about 1925 or so there was a Matwok station at the underjump with platforms on the Main Line and Rockaway Branch.

Also, Hepburn's garage had live chickens running around way back then. When I was born, Vandeveer's Dairy Farm still had cows on the corner of Metropolitan Ave. and Woodhaven Blvd. And if you looked down at what is now the Little League field as the train passed over Fleet St., you would have seen a...

I was aboard the last LIRR train to stop at Parkside on June 8, 1962. In the photo of that train stopped at Parkside on ARRT's-ARRCHIVES you can see me hanging out a window along with two of my buddies. By that time the eastbound track had been removed and the westbound track had a spring switch nea...

How true, Publius. When I was two years old in 1948 my parents took me to Cape Cod for vacation. At Sandwich I got restless during church, so my father took me across the street to the train station. The train was in, with a steam locomotive on the point. The engineer said to Dad, "Would the bo...

Please don't forget the Rockaway Branch. The platforms at Rego Park, Parkside, Brooklyn Manor, Woodhaven Junction and Ozone Park were high level as far back as the Glendale Cut-off in 1908. Wooden platforms except for the last two. In the late 1950's the east-bound high-level platform at Parkside wa...

I was aboard the last train to make the trip to Ozone Park on June 8, 1962. Two friends and I had planned on getting off at Parkside, but we stayed aboard to the end of the line when the champagne bottles were uncorked after coming through the Whitepot underjump. Now I hope that I will live long eno...