Jumping the Gun
No one ever had been able to ride a train under the East River, and then one day anybody could - the change happened overnight. Yet, like the tunnels themselves, the public's interest had been growing steadily for years, years during which some people decided not to wait, but to move east to Nassau County. The promise of the tunnels had lured "leading edge" commuters to the Island, people who were willing to tolerate commuting the old way for a few years. These early birds reasoned that their new suburban homes would have cost much more had they waited to buy them until the tunnels opened.
LIRR statistics illustrate how the ranks of these new commuters grew. In 1901, the railroad had carried passengers on 14.5 million trips; in 1909, there were 27.5 million trips. By the time direct service to Manhattan began, the number of commuter trips likely was twice what it had been back in 1901. For August 1910 (the last pre-tunnel month), the railroad sold 17,354 monthly commutation tickets. For stations in the vicinity of Hicksville, monthly commutation ticket sales for that August were as follows:
- Westbury: 32
- Syosset: 36
- Central Park (now Bethpage): 50
- Farmingdale: 58
- Mineola: 67
- Massapequa: 79
- Hicksville: 85
