The South Side Falls to the Long Island
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after all the optimistic predictions of the first few years? The causes are not hard to seek:
- The excessive cost of the Bushwick outlet. The South Eighth Street terminal could not and did not originate enough traffic to offset the high cost of installing and maintaining the terminus. In the beginning the breaking up of each train into car units, each drawn by six or eight horses, must have been a very expensive operation, and the South Side must have been compelled to maintain a stable of horses almost as large as the average horse car line of that day. Later, the four steam dummies cost $10,000 each and exposed the company to a whole series of costly judgments for damages of all kinds. Finally, we can only guess how much of the company's money went for thinly disguised political payoffs. We must remember, too, that the company was forced into laying the Bushwick road twice over, once with T rail and once with grooved rail, and each time a mile and a half of pavement had to be replaced. Even in terms of 1870 labor costs this must have been an expensive business.
- The extension into Hunter's Point: To effect an outlet to the East River, a point of pride with the South Side RR, they built not only the enormously costly Williamsburgh terminus, but the duplicate Hunter's Point terminal.The company had to buy out the New York & Flushing RR's track at $40,000 a mile and then completely rebuild the road. Then, after all this expense, Oliver Charlick prevented the company from running any revenue trains over the new extension for many months by cutting off access to the property and refusing to release the Long Dock.
- The double tracking of the road. The installation of a second track on any road is virtually equivalent to building it twice over, for it necessitates doubling the width of the graded area and doubling the size of all the bridges and culverts. When one considers that the South Side RR was running at its peak only nine trains a day each way, it is obvious that the second track was a luxury not strictly justified by the traffic. To gratify a foolish vanity, the South Side RR was forced to assume a third mortgage of half a million dollars, the interest
