St. James Freight station

Hello all,

its been awhile since i last posted, but here is my question. The old freight house in St James, was it used to ferment pickles? can anyone tell me when it was erected and when it came down, i was told that it burned down in a fire? is there any truth to this? also if anyone has any picture please post them. thanks

Retroboy:

Here’s what I’ve researched for you on your St. James question.

First, the freight house and the building of which you speak were two (2) entirely different structures.

The LIRR’s freight house was built on the site in question, on the north side of the team track and just west of the depot. It was of the hip-roofed variety and had a high level loading platform on all sides, similar to the photo of the Hicksville express house that appears in my LIRR book at the bottom of page 119.

To the west of the freight house was the New York Telephone Co.’s pole yard. The team track, which had a capacity of 20 cars, actually had a “dog-leg” built into the western end of it, to allow for safer loading of the telephone poles onto flat cars. (This was obviously due to the lay-out of the yard itself.)

The freight house came down sometime in 1944 or earlier. In 1944, the structure of which you speak was built on the site of the old freight house. This newer building housed Western Suffolk Produce. It’s architecture was typical of most of the produce houses that were scattered trackside years ago. By 1957-58, the building had been leased to a feed company.

There was no mention of a pickle plant, unless that came after the late 1950s, which I doubt. Most of the pickle plants on LI (and there were MANY) were already in place around the turn of the century. (B&G had a major operation trackside in Farmingdale. I have old waybills from Farmingdale from 1909-10 showing barrels of pickles being shipped. Then, of course, there was the “infamous” Golden’s Pickle Works trackside at Calverton which was visited by a LIRR train on an August Friday the 13th in 1926!)

Hope this gives you a bit of insight and some answers to your question(s).

Also, as an extra in case you’re interested, there was a passing siding located south of the tracks with a capacity of 36 cars. It stretched from about the site of the start of the west end of the team track and extended eastward past the depot and across the road, connecting back to the main track east of the crossing. This siding was removed in the early 1950s.

Dave Keller

The building that burned down was the one Dave referred to...the former Western Suffolk Produce place. I remember my mother referring to it as the potato house. It burned down in summer in the early '80s, I think '81. Since it was storing horse feed, hay, and the like, it lit up the night sky quite well. My mother said wake up and we got on our bikes and pedaled up. The fire cancelled morning service on the LIRR through St. James because of the fire hoses across the tracks.