LIRR and D&LW and the Columbia Grammar Prep. Football Team

[daveklepper]

Don't know whether this belongs on TRAINS Transit forum or here.  Any one who enjoyed the Erie Boosters article some time ago might enjoy this posting.   Here goes.

As a teenager, I was not very athletic and someone underweight and scrawny.  So my highschool football coach made me first assistant manager and then manager the next two years.   CGS regularly used Campus Coach Lines, still in business as NYCity charter bus operation, for almost all special transportation.  But I was always a railfan.   CGS played two games with both Morristown Academy in Morristown, New Jersey, and with Woodmere Academy on Long Island.  Of course I had to check whether the school would save money by group rates on the commuter trains, and of course the saving was substantial.  Morristown Academy meant boarding the AA local at 96th and Central Park West, getting off at Hudson Terminal (later to be WTC), and walking about 1/3-mile to the Barkley Street ferry of the DL&W and riding one of  the classic Dover-bound mu electrics to Morristown, with the football field less than 1/4-mile away.  The school furnished me a pack of nickles for the subway ride going, and on the return the students would pay the subway fare, since it was a replacement for their normal transit ride home.  Thge ferry was free with the group railroad ticket, indeed, my  memory is that in one direction or the other, freeloaders could ride since no one checked tickets in one or the other directions.   I knew enough to direct the other students to the appropriate subway station on the way home to get them to their homes as quickly as possible, and some were commuters from Brooklyn, including my classmate and cousin David Lewis.

Going to Woodmere was also easy.  But at that time, service to Woodmere was given mostly by trains running a loop service, going out via Jamaica and Valley Stream and returning by the present A-train subway line, Far Rockaway, across Jamaica bay past what is now Kennedy Airport, then operated by the LIRR before the Hammels trestle fire.   These trains did not touch Jamaica, but curved directly onto the Atlantic Avenue branch if terminating in Brooklyn or onto the Main Line between Forest Hills and Kew Gardens if going to Penn Station.   I knew my stuff, knew the game times, and so the first year we went out from Penn Station (AA train directly to Penn Station) via Jamaica, and then to the puzzlement of most of my fellow students, boarded a train in the same direction at Woodmere, to go around the loop and back to Penn Station. 

The next year I checked the outbound schedule and thought nothing had changed.   Boy was I wrong.  Acting on the same scenereo, at Woodmere, we boarded the train going south via the loop.  After leaving Broad Channel, I was shocked to realize we would not be stopping at Rego Park but were taking the switch to the Atlantic Branch and the next stop was the elevated station at East New York.   Some of the kids were quite panicky, but I told them not to worry, somehow I'd get them all home safe and sound.   Those who lived in Brooklyn were delighted because my mistake was saving them 20 minutes or more on the homebound commute, and they were perfectly familiar with downtown Brooklyn and its subway stations.  My cousin David Lewis was delighted that all he had to do was cross Flatbush Avenue and join his Dad at the pharmacy and they would go home together.  For the Manahttan kids I led them all to the inbound IRT Atlantic Avenue station platform, explained the east siders should use the Lexington Avneue expresses on the express track, and be sure to change to a local at 42nd-Grand Central if a local stop was nearest their home, and west siders, including me, for the 7th Avenue trains on the local track, with a change to a local at 72nd Street needed by about half of us.  So 20 minutes save for the Brooklyn kids was compensated by 20 minutes extra for the Manhattan kids.   I don't remember what our coach was doing all this time, probably just watching my performance with amusement.   The next morning in English class, "Cap" Fields, who later on was Chariman of the New York Division of the Electric Railroaders Associaton for several terms, opened the class with "So, David Klepper, you want to move CGS to Brooklyn?"  I did not have an answer.  (Cap Fileds did call students by their first name only but David Lewis and David KLepper were exceptions.)   I also don't remember which games CGS won or lost, just the details of the trips.  I think CGS went back to using Camus Coach Lines.