Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
If you take a train from Penn Station to Babylon, or a train from Grand Central to North White Plains, you'll never have a crossing. In fact for most of the main lines, you're never at grade. You're on an elevated structure, an embankment or a trench.
In the postwar decades, they converted the busiest lines to rapid transit-level infrastructure.
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I don't think I've ridden a LIRR train in about 10 years, and my experience is limited to riding to/from the Islip airport from Ronkonkoma. There definitely were a few grade crossings on that line when I first rode it in the late 90s, as well as platforms that were shorter than the trains.
An extremely obscure fact is that the route and service pattern of Cincinnati Rapid Transit Loop was changed five years into construction. It was originally planned to be a true double-track loop and to have zero grade crossings, but after the buying power of the 1916 bond issue was halved by WWI inflation, in a scramble to buy property to create a line that could function, the board was forced to buy private property that would have necessitated a handful of grade crossings in this area:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/o.../data=!3m1!1e3
I have the property line maps of the purchase somewhere at my house. The loop operating pattern was abandoned (at least temporarily) so that the thing would operate as a traditional line, with a station at Madison Rd. serving as the origin and terminal station of all trips, and all trains would share about 2,000 feet of track before either traveling on the western side of the loop or the eastern.