Mass transit consisted of stagecoaches that struggled along muddy dirt roads in those days. There was no Hicksville yet, but if you took a particular stage, you could get pretty close to where it would sprout later. Once a week, a stagecoach left Brooklyn for Jericho, and a day or two later, it returned to Brooklyn.
A Railroad With a Vision
The cities of New York and Boston were vital to the turbulent economy of the fledgling nation, but communication between them was slow. People and documents had to be carried by horse, stage, or newfangled steamboat. Railroads promised to be faster, but in the 1820s, no one thought they could conquer the shortest route – the irregular and rocky Connecticut shoreline.
The founders of the LIRR had a new vision. They intended to create a railroad of swift trains that carried important passengers (i.e., businessmen) from New York Harbor to a distant North Shore port, where they would board an LIRR steamboat bound for the New England coast just south of Boston. Bostonians would travel the same route in reverse. There would be as few stops as necessary along the way.
Many Long Island towns would get railroad stations, but only because building a station was a requisite if you wanted to lay track through a populated place. Ideally, “Boston Trains” would ignore these places because the emphasis was on fast (and profitable) end-to-end service. As far as the railroad’s stockholders were concerned, rural Islanders had been getting around for decades via stagecoach, and the stage lines could have them.
