THE main branch of the Long Island Railroad runs east-west through the heart of Queens, exiting the borough into Nassau County in Bellerose. The railroad also diverges into two branches running southeast, the western one at 150th Street and Archer Avenue and the eastern one at 177th Street, The two branches run southeast through Springfield Gardens and St. Albans respectively, combing just east of 225th Street to form the Babylon Branch. It’s the westernmost branch I am talking about today, which has station stops at Locust Manor and Laurelton. I haven’t been in the neighborhood since a walk on Baisley Boulevard awhile back, so I am using screen captures from Google Street View here.
The LIRR branch is bridged over several area roads such as 111th Avenue, shown above. What’s unusual is that long-ago lighting, which may or may not have been original, is preserved in several of the viaducts.
These are what I call “cuplights without the cups” manufactured by SLECO. With full housing, these were once deployed all over NYC and found a home on both castiron lamps and more modern octagonal lamps first introduced in the 1950s. As pendant lamps, they could also be found beneath highway and elevated train trestles. This is a rarer variant without the housing, and with mesh wire to protect the incandescent bulb, possibly against vandals. Another variant without the housing, but with the glass reflector bowl, can be found on 1st Avenue beneath Windsor Tower south of the United Nations.
Im most cases the Department of Transportation no longer services these lamps (Check me in Comments), though I did find a lit one on Baisley Boulevard (see link). 111th Avenue isn’t the only railroad trestle that still claims this feature; they can be found on trestles spanning Guy Brewer Boulevard, Foch Boulevard, Farmers Boulevard and even Springfield Boulevard. Meanwhile other overpasses on 110th Avenue and Linden Boulevard have “newer” sodium pendants, some of which are themselves three decades old.
The branch also features some interesting pedestrian-only crossings, such as this one at 109th Avenue.
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3/11/26