Salisbury Plains - Levittown
 
 LIRR Central Branch Extension
 

Ticket Meadow Brook-Jamaica Form SX-131 
Archive: Brad Phillips

SALISBURY PLAINS:  WOODEN SHELTER SHED BUILT: c. 1916 USED TO STORE LUMBER DURING CONSTRUCTION OF 2ND DEPOT. RAZED: 1923 (?)
2ND DEPOT OPENED: 12/10/23, CLOSED: c. 1942-43 DUE TO WARTIME SECURITY OF TRAINS PASSING THROUGH MITCHEL FIELD TO GET TO THIS STATION STOP. DEPOT BECAME A RESIDENCE AFTER WWII (1947) AND LATER HOUSED A PRIVATE BUSINESS. TRACKS REMOVED: 1956. RAZED: c. 1990s

The door has been bricked shut and a small section of Spanish roof tiles are still in place.  The resident couple who were there in 1947 appear to have moved out by the time William Slade took this photo on 7/27/53.  (Art Huneke archive)

While in college for two summers 1966-67, I worked as a student engineer, across the street from LIRR #35 at General Applied Science Labs (GASL), a subsidiary
of Marquardt, performing ramjet research and testing, in the building that had earlier been the Meadowbrook Country Club. A part of the property had been the old Meadowbrook Station, later the Salisbury Station building.

The station platform was a great place to eat lunch and I spent some of my lunch hours on nice days sitting there.  I spent one lunch hour trying to trace the LIRR central branch across the street thru Salisbury Park, but there were few clues left except towards the far eastern side of the park, where a small fill was still evident. 

To the west of the station was the "bridge over nothing," which is shown today on a number of websites.  It provided access under the LIRR within the country club property. The space under the bridge has long ago been filled in with dirt after the country club closed, but the bridge was still visible.                Map: 1946  Hagstrom Nassau Map - Archive: Historic Map Works

By the time I worked there, the tracks had been lifted, but GASL assumed use of the station building and surrounding property as part of their facility. At the time GASL used the platform area, and possibly the interior of the station building, to store cylinders of compressed gas, probably for use in small wind-tunnel tests. I remember the cylinders chained to eyes in the wall to prevent them falling over.  Today, it's all gone; GASL, the station, and the branch extension to Meadowbrook/Salisbury.   Info: Art Single
 

I'm curious as to whether there ever was a ticket agency here, otherwise why bother to build a bay window?  Perhaps there were intentions of an agency and it never happened, or . . . it may have had an agency for a short period of time. . . . Nobody around to know this anymore. But it was originally just a wooden shelter-shed so somehow someone felt there was a need to build such a substantial structure for a "nowhere" station stop at the time . . . A full lower level plus a full upper level!  If the upper level were a waiting room and possibly a ticket office, I wonder what the lower level housed?

The property in Levittown where the main electric utility service wires are, is still owned by the Long Island Rail Road/MTA. This was the site of the former Central Rail Road Line, which is located north of Hempstead Turnpike, Levittown, New York. In the years before Levittown when this was all farmland the local farmers would sometimes refer to it as the "Manure Line". This property has been in the news in the past. In 1963, the Nassau Planning Commission recommended that the rail line should be reactivated as part of a transportation loop. The plan was protested by homeowners along the right-of-way area. This map is from the front page of the Levittown Tribune, June 27, 1963  Info/Archive: Joshua Soren