Long Island Rail Road: Map, History, Pictures, Logo

Last revised: September 21, 2026

The Long Island Rail Road is the commuter railroad of Long Island, and it has been one since the first train ran from Brooklyn to Jamaica on April 18, 1836. It was chartered to do something else. The early company wanted to be the fast way from New York to Boston: rail to Greenport, at the eastern tip of the North Fork, and a steamer across the Sound to Stonington. That gamble lasted about four years. What survived it is the busiest commuter railroad in the United States, still carrying its own name, now under the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The map is a fan. Almost everything of consequence still passes Jamaica, in Queens. West of there the railroad reaches Penn Station, Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, Long Island City, and, since January 25, 2023, Grand Central Madison. East of Jamaica the branches run to Port Washington, Port Jefferson, Oyster Bay, Far Rockaway, Long Beach, Hempstead, West Hempstead, Babylon, Montauk, and Greenport. Freight, since 1997, has been operated by private short line New York & Atlantic.

Long Island Rail Road Alco C420 213 with a passenger train at Mineola, New York, in 1964

Alco C-420 #213 with a passenger train at Mineola, New York, in 1964. American-Rails.com collection. The thirty C-420s, 200–229, were the railroad’s main-line diesel from the mid-1960s until the GP38-2s arrived in 1976 and 1977.

On this page: At a glance · Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Greenport · Corbin’s island · The Pennsylvania and Penn Station · System map (1969) · A commuter railroad in bankruptcy · January 20, 1966 · Third rail · Freight, and the New York & Atlantic · The railroad now

At a glance

A Pennsylvania-era Long Island Rail Road mark, the keystone the parent company had already made famous. Author’s work.

Item	Detail
Railroad	Long Island Rail Road. Equipment mark LI. Slogan Route of the Dashing Commuter
Headquarters	Jamaica, Queens. Under the Pennsylvania, the corporate address was often Philadelphia
Where	Long Island: Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, Suffolk. Manhattan terminals at Penn Station and Grand Central Madison
Genesis	Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad, incorporated April 25, 1832. Long Island Rail Road incorporated April 24, 1834, to lease that road and build east
First trains	April 18, 1836, Brooklyn–Jamaica. The first railroad on Long Island
Dates	April 18, 1836–. Still operating
Gauge	4 ft 8½ in
Route-miles	A little over 300 today, on the order of 124 stations. A 1930 figure in print is 397. Another peak figure is about 378. The two do not describe the same map
Principal lines	Long Island City and Hunterspoint Avenue–Jamaica; Flatbush Avenue–Jamaica; Woodside–Port Washington; Jamaica–Hicksville–Ronkonkoma–Greenport; Hicksville–Port Jefferson; Mineola–Oyster Bay; Floral Park–Hempstead; Jamaica–Babylon–Montauk; Hicksville–Babylon; Valley Stream–Far Rockaway and West Hempstead; Lynbrook–Long Beach
Shops	Morris Park, in Queens, for the steam and diesel years. Hillside is the modern maintenance complex
Into Manhattan	Penn Station September 8, 1910. Grand Central Madison January 25, 2023
Last steam	October 8, 1955, Hicksville. G5s 35 and 39. The story of 39 is its own page
Pennsylvania control	1900. The price long attached to the purchase is $6 million. Sold back to New York on January 20, 1966
Public owner	Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority, 1966. The MTA has operated the railroad since 1968
Freight	New York & Atlantic Railway, Anacostia & Pacific, from May 12, 1997
Rosters	Steam · Diesel

Dates follow the railroad’s own chronology, Ediger and Morgan in Trains, the New York Times of August 31, 1966, and the contemporary account of the January 20, 1966, closing. Information compiled September 21, 2026.

A railroad aimed at Boston

The Brooklyn & Jamaica was incorporated on April 25, 1832, to build from the East River at Brooklyn out to Jamaica. The Long Island Rail Road was incorporated on April 24, 1834, to lease that company and keep going. The first locomotives were the Ariel and the Post Boy, Baldwins, ordered for the Brooklyn & Jamaica. Service opened April 18, 1836. George H. Ediger, writing in Trains in March 1949, counted eleven locomotives on the property by 1844.

The reason for the long main line was a boat. Rails reached Greenport on July 27, 1844, with excursion trains, and revenue service began two days later, on July 29. At Greenport, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s steamers crossed Long Island Sound to Stonington, Connecticut, and the Old Colony finished the trip into Boston. The rail-and-water route cut New York–Boston from something like sixteen hours to something like eight. It was a clever piece of geography, and it depended on nobody building a railroad along the Connecticut shore.

Somebody did. The New York & New Haven opened an all-rail route in 1848, the line that became the Shore Line and, much later, part of the Northeast Corridor. The Greenport boats lost the through passenger. The Long Island was left with a main line that ran the length of the island to a dock that no longer mattered, and with a local business that could not yet pay for it. The company went into bankruptcy on March 4, 1850, and came out, under the same name, on January 25, 1851. A charter amendment of April 21, 1862, let it build anywhere east of Jamaica. That sentence is the modern railroad: branches, not a bridge route.

Branches, beaches, and Austin Corbin

The branches came in a rush once the Boston dream was dead. Hicksville was already on the main line. The line toward Cold Spring reached Syosset in 1854 and Northport on April 15, 1868. The Smithtown & Port Jefferson, organized in 1870, opened into Port Jefferson on January 13, 1873. Locust Valley and the Oyster Bay branch date from April 19, 1869. Sag Harbor, reached by way of Manorville, opened May 9, 1870. Far Rockaway’s railroad is an 1869 line. The south shore to the Hamptons and Montauk was the Brooklyn & Montauk, opened in 1881. Manhattan Beach opened July 19, 1877. Long Beach opened in 1880. Port Washington was finished in 1898.

Austin Corbin took control in 1880 and spent the next decade buying the competitors that had sprung up on the island: north shore, south shore, and the beach lines. By about 1900 the Long Island was the railroad of Long Island, a commuter carrier into Brooklyn and a summer railroad to the ocean, with a thin freight business in produce, coal, and whatever the island manufactured. A 1959 booklet the railroad published for itself claimed a long list of “firsts,” including a steam whistle in 1836, piggyback in 1885, and an all-steel passenger car in 1905. Treat that booklet as advertising. The 1885 “piggyback” was farm wagons on flatcars, which is a real practice and a different thing from modern trailer-on-flatcar. The steel-car claim and the whistle claim are the company’s, and they are not settled here.

What is solid is the shape Corbin left. The island’s other steam railroads had been gathered in. The ferries at Long Island City still did the last mile into Manhattan, because no one had yet dug under the East River.

Cassatt, the tunnels, and September 8, 1910

The Pennsylvania Railroad took control in 1900. The figure repeated for a century is $6 million. Alexander J. Cassatt wanted a station in Manhattan for the Pennsylvania’s own trains, which then ended in Jersey City, and the Long Island was the other half of the same idea: tubes under the Hudson, a station under Thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue, and tubes under the East River to Queens. Samuel Rea carried the project. Charles M. Jacobs engineered the tunnels. Work was underway from 1901.

The North River tunnels, under the Hudson, were holed through on September 11, 1906. The East River tunnels were finished in 1909. Long Island trains began using Penn Station on September 8, 1910. The station opened to all of its traffic on November 27, 1910. David P. Morgan, in Trains for December 1952, noted that the tunnels let the Long Island give up a fleet of nine ferries. For the first time the commuter could stay on the train from Jamaica to a platform in Manhattan.

Electrification had already started, in 1905, with third rail. It spread over the lines that fed the tunnels, because steam could not run the East River bores. Under the Pennsylvania, something under a third of the route-miles sat under third rail. The East End, and the outer ends of Port Jefferson, Oyster Bay, and Montauk, stayed with steam. That split is still the railroad’s personality. The city side is an electric subway that happens to use railroad cars. The island side, past the third-rail gaps, was a steam railroad until 1955 and a diesel railroad after that.

The Pennsylvania also handed the Long Island its modern steam engines. Juniata built thirty-one G5s Ten-Wheelers between 1924 and 1929, and the parent sent over H6 and H10 Consolidations for freight. Those classes, and the earlier engines the 1898 number scheme replaced, are on the steam roster. George H. Drury’s steam guide never gave the Long Island a chapter.

System map (1969)

Official 1969 system map of the Long Island Rail Road

An official 1969 system map. Author’s collection. The public railroad was already three years into state ownership. The map is still the fan: Jamaica in the middle, Manhattan and Brooklyn to the west, the forks of the island to the east.

Read it from Jamaica. West, one pair of routes drops to Flatbush Avenue and another runs to Long Island City and Hunterspoint Avenue, with the Penn Station lines leaving the map into the tunnels. North of the Main Line are Port Washington, Port Jefferson, and Oyster Bay. South are Far Rockaway, Long Beach, the West Hempstead branch, Babylon, and the long Montauk branch through the Hamptons. The Main Line itself is the old Greenport railroad, by Hicksville, Farmingdale, and Ronkonkoma, still the spine, long after the Stonington boats were gone. South Farmingdale is a place on that history. It is not a separate railroad from Hicksville to Greenport.

The only Class I that lived on tickets

Ediger’s 1941 numbers explain the company better than a route description. Total revenue was $25.4 million. Passenger tickets were $16.5 million of that. Freight was $8.9 million. The Long Island was the only American Class I whose passengers paid it far more than its freight did. In the Pennsylvania years the summer schedule ran 813 passenger trains a day, and the winter schedule 746. That is a railroad measured in headways, not in tonnage.

It is also why the company broke. Morgan’s account is that the New York Public Service Commission held commutation fares nearly still from 1918 to 1947, while the tax bill rose from $1.4 million in 1921 to $3.8 million by 1948. Subways, parkways, and the bridges off the island took the discretionary trip. The Pennsylvania lost money in 1946 for the first time in its modern history and was no longer willing to cover the subsidiary. The Long Island announced bankruptcy on February 2, 1949, and filed on March 2, 1949. The Pennsylvania kept the stock. The railroad kept running, in gray paint and in the papers.

On November 22, 1950, two trains collided at Richmond Hill, in Queens. That wreck, and the others of the same season, made the bankruptcy a public subject. The state answered with a rehabilitation. On August 12, 1954, a twelve-year, $65 million program was announced under Thomas M. Goodfellow, a Pennsylvania man who became the Long Island’s president. New coaches, the ten RS-3s that finished steam, and a diesel roster that finally matched the job all belong to that decade. The public end of steam was Hicksville, October 8, 1955.

Long Island Rail Road C420s 203 and 208 at Jamaica yard in 1970

C-420s #203 and #208 at Jamaica yard in 1970, four years after the state bought the railroad and two years after the MTA became the operator. American-Rails.com collection.

Sixty-five million dollars, at Jamaica

The legislature created the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority in 1965 for this purchase. A down payment of $10 million went over on December 22, 1965. On January 20, 1966, William J. Ronan delivered the remaining $55 million at the railroad’s Jamaica offices. The price was $65 million. The seller was the Pennsylvania. The New York Times of August 31, 1966, looking back, said the authority had bought the bankrupt railroad the previous January for that sum, and that the first phase of a three-year modernization was already underway, including platforms being raised for new cars. The MTA, as the authority was reconstituted, has operated the Long Island since 1968. The railroad was not renamed. The mark on the equipment stayed LI.

The car that symbolized the new owner was the M1, built by Budd from 1968, a high-platform electric multiple-unit that made the old MP54 look like what it was. Diesel territory got GP38-2s and, for a few years more, the Alco C-420s. Twelve of those C-420s, 200–211, went to the Delaware & Hudson on lease in 1977, still in MTA paint. They were back, or gone elsewhere, by the end of that year.

Third rail, and the cars that are not locomotives

From 1905 the western railroad has been an electric railroad. Third rail, direct current, feeds the lines into Penn Station and, now, into Grand Central Madison. The East River tunnels still do not allow a diesel to lead a train. That single rule is why the dual-mode DM30AC exists, and why most passengers never see a locomotive at all. They ride M7s and M9s, the descendants of the M1 idea: a married pair, a motorman, high platforms, and a schedule counted in minutes.

The Pennsylvania-era electric car was the MP54 and its steel relatives. The Long Island liked to say it had retired its last wooden passenger car in 1927, which fits the modernization that also brought the G5s. Those cars are a fleet of their own, and so are the M1s, M3s, M7s, and M9s. A handful of electric locomotives, DD1s among them, worked the tunnels and the yards in the Pennsylvania years.

What the New York & Atlantic took

Passenger service was the whole point, and freight was the part the state was willing to contract out. On May 12, 1997, the New York & Atlantic Railway, an Anacostia & Pacific company, took the freight franchise. Joe Greenstein, in Trains for May 1999, described a railroad of about 269 miles, from Fresh Pond and Jamaica out to Port Jefferson, Montauk, and Southold, plus Bay Ridge and Maspeth, moving about 28,000 carloads a year with 13 locomotives and 41 people, up from eight locomotives at the start. Those are 1999 figures. They are the right way to remember the handover, and they are not a description of the franchise in 2026. The New York & Atlantic’s locomotives are not Long Island locomotives, and they are not on the diesel roster.

Penn Station, Grand Central, and a Friday train to Montauk

The railroad people ride in 2026 is still the 1836 company, which is a strange sentence to be able to write about an American railroad. Electric trains fill Penn Station’s lower level. Grand Central Madison, the East Side Access terminal deep under Grand Central, opened on January 25, 2023, and gave the Long Island a second Manhattan station for the first time since the ferries. A third Main Line track between Floral Park and Hicksville was finished in 2022, which is the unglamorous project that actually adds trains. On summer Fridays the Cannonball still runs for the Hamptons and Montauk, a diesel-territory train with a name older than the MTA.

East of the third rail, the locomotive is an EMD DE30AC, or a DM30AC if the train has to come through the tunnels into Penn Station. Twenty-three of each were built in 1997–99, at EMD’s shop in the old Super Steel plant in Schenectady. One dual-mode was later rebuilt as a straight diesel, and two others are gone, so the fleet in service is 24 DE30ACs and 20 DM30ACs. The diesel roster has the builder numbers. The steam roster ends with the two Ten-Wheelers that stood at Hicksville in 1955. Both still exist. No. 39 is the one this site has already followed.

Sources

George H. Ediger, “Long Island Rail Road,” Trains, March 1949. Revenue for 1941, the eleven locomotives of 1844, and the summer and winter train counts.
David P. Morgan, “Long Island: Which Plan D’Ya Read,” Trains, December 1952. The fare freeze, the tax figures, and the nine ferries.
New York Times, August 31, 1966. The authority had bought the railroad the previous January for $65 million.
Contemporary account of the closing at Jamaica: $10 million on December 22, 1965, and the remaining $55 million on January 20, 1966, William J. Ronan for the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority.
Joe Greenstein, “Long Island’s Freight Revival,” Trains, May 1999. New York & Atlantic mileage, carloads, and locomotives as of that article.
Edward M. Koehler Jr., “LIRR Motive Power History: Steam, 1898–1955,” NRHS list, March 22, 2024, via trainsarefun.com. The steam classes summarized on the companion page.
Railroad Museum of Long Island, notes on G5s 39, including the October 8, 1955, ceremony at Hicksville.
The Diesel Shop, Long Island Rail Road roster, rebuilt February 11, 2026, read against Dave Keller’s motive-power pages at trainsarefun.com. The diesel companion is the unit list.