{"id":2066,"date":"2007-01-31T09:42:39","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T17:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/01\/the_lionel-industrial_complex_has_its_grubby_paws_on_everything.html"},"modified":"2008-01-24T14:19:23","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T19:19:23","slug":"the_lionelindus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/01\/the_lionelindus.html","title":{"rendered":"The Lionel-Industrial Complex Has Its Grubby Paws On Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amazingly, this time it&#8217;s not a prop for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/citywide\/filming\/index.htm\">a film shoot<\/a> but rather <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/01\/31\/nyregion\/31freight.html?ex=1327899600&#038;en=177a9d98fc464c64&#038;ei=5090&#038;partner=rssuserland&#038;emc=rss\">the sooty chug-chug of commerce that&#8217;s rolling around the bend<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Gritty freight trains may be a familiar sight out West and in cowboy movies, but in Queens and Brooklyn and the neat suburbs of Long Island, they are a roaring, sooty cause for a big double take.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We go through here every day, and everyone still looks at us like &#8216;What the heck is this?'&#8221; said Tom Materka, a rail freight engineer, as the train approached the Hicksville station, one of the Long Island Rail Road&#8217;s busiest commuter stops, one recent afternoon. &#8220;People are always shocked to see a freight train coming through here.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Materka, 30, an engineer for the New York &#038; Atlantic Railway, one of the few remaining short-line rail freight companies in the region, was running two screaming 120-ton diesel locomotives towing a string of sooty boxcars from Queens out to eastern Long Island. Well-dressed commuters looked up from their newspapers and coffee and stared as the smoky train roared by and transformed the suburban station into Tumbleweed Junction.<\/p>\n<p>The line uses obscure rail tracks in Queens and Brooklyn and tracks of the Long Island Rail Road in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.<\/p>\n<p>Since freight trains are far outnumbered by commuter trains, few people glimpse the bulky, graffiti-covered boxcars as they lumber past the sleek silver commuter cars rushing passengers to or from Pennsylvania Station.<\/p>\n<p>But passengers can expect to see more of these trains soon. Transportation experts, government officials and rail freight advocates say conditions are suddenly in their favor.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amazingly, this time it&#8217;s not a prop for a film shoot but rather the sooty chug-chug of commerce that&#8217;s rolling around the bend: Gritty freight trains may be a familiar sight out West and in cowboy movies, but in Queens and Brooklyn and the neat suburbs of Long Island, they are a roaring, sooty cause [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture_infrastructure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}