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Brooklyn Elevated Equipment by James Clifford Greller Hard cover
Brooklyn Elevated Equipment by James Clifford Greller hard cover
Brooklyn Elevated Equipment
James Clifford Greller
Hard Cover
256 Pages
Copyright 2013-12-30
Contents
This work is a more in-depth look at the rolling stock of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit's El system. It is a companion volume to my original book on the Brooklyn Els published in 1987 by NJ International. My purpose in writing these books is to keep alive the work of yesterday's transportation for future generations. I am a firm believer that the more we know about the history of New York City's past transportation practices, the better prepared we will be in making future transportation decisions. No finer example to my mind was the Brooklyn enterprise known as the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) and its later incarnations. Today, government panders to obtain private participation in public transit, when in the previous century they did every trick to take it away from privately-owned traction interests in favor of municipal ownership. The mandate of the nickel fare was a yolk that eventually forced the Brooklyn transit corporations to sell.
The first section of this book relates the story of the steam-operated surface railroads that were built to serve the growing passenger traffic to the resort of Coney Island during the dawn of the industrial age. One could argue that the development of steam propulsion in the 19th century was the equivalent of today's Microsoft and Apple revolution. It just changed everything, and helped us define the way we would see the future.
The second part of the book covers the Brooklyn Bridge, for it alone focused a speed and directness that erased the barriers posed by the East River and its slow and weather-prone ferry service. Today, when few people give a second thought to crossing large bodies of water, including the English Channel, by tunnel or bridge, the narrow East River posed a huge barrier until 1883.
Third is the rise of Brooklyn's elevated railways. Now steam propulsion would be able to move more people further and faster, and enable the development of what was then the New York suburbs of Brooklyn and Queens. The genius of the BRT was to seize the opportunities presented by various transportation technologies and integrate them into a seamless, coherent transportation system. In an era where Wall Street wolves were less civilized than today (if that is imaginable), the BRT fended off all other rivals, and built an effective transportation business.
This book concentrates on the beginning of the Elevated equipment from the Steam railroads to Coney Island, the New York and Brooklyn Bridge cable cars and the steam electircs. How all that equipment became part of the formidable Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. Here is a historical illustration of how transportation made the great transformation of a small Dutch farm land into a major metropolis possible.
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