Chartered in 1834 to provide a route between New York City and Boston, the Long Island Rail Road ran from the Brooklyn waterfront through the center of Long Island to Greenport. The railroad served the agricultural market on Long Island until branches and competing lines eventually developed on the north and south shores of the island and several hundred passenger stations were built. After Penn Station was opened in 1910, the number of passengers commuting between Manhattan and Long Island began to multiply. Today, one hundred twenty-five stations serve the Long Island Rail Road. Long Island Rail Road Stations contains vintage postcards of the old Penn Station, which was demolished in the mid-1960s; the Grand Stairway at the Forest Hills Station, where Theodore Roosevelt delivered his famous unification speech on July 4, 1917; and the Amagansett station building, where Nazi spies boarded a train bound for New York City on June 13, 1942. Many of the historic stations featured in this book have been preserved by local preservation groups, while others have been replaced with modern buildings to accommodate the passengers who commute on the nation's largest commuter railroad.

In 1870, the communities of Astoria, Dutch Kills, Hunters Point, Ravenswood, and Blissville (near today's Sunnyside) merged to form a new municipality: Long Island City. This once independent city is undergoing an immense transformation as high rises replace single-family homes. It is the charm of a small town in a big city that many new residents have never seen.

The Long Island Railroad is the third oldest in the USA and has been in operation since 1836. When it opened in 1867 the South Side Railroad was its first direct competitor. In his detailed book, Vincent F. Seyfried has given a comprehensive account of its development.

The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair was the largest international exhibition ever built in the United States. More than one hundred fifty pavilions and exhibits spread over six hundred forty-six acres helped the fair live up to its reputation as "the Billion-Dollar Fair." With the cold war in full swing, the fair offered visitors a refreshingly positive view of the future, mirroring the official theme: Peace through Understanding. Guests could travel back in time through a display of full-sized dinosaurs, or look into a future where underwater hotels and flying cars were commonplace. They could enjoy Walt Disney's popular shows, or study actual spacecraft flown in orbit. More than fifty-one million guests visited the fair before it closed forever in 1965. The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair captures the history of this event through vintage photographs, published here for the first time.

An amazing assortment of electric trolley lines once traversed the towns and villages of Queens and Long Island. With names like Jamaica Central, Northport Traction, Ocean Electric, and the Steinway lines, some meandered across meadows and hills while others sped over elevated tracks. There was even one line that had streetcars but no tracks. In the end, all of them helped stitch the countryside into the concentrated suburban area it is today--with barely a trace of the trolleys left anywhere.

The Long Island Rail Road is the oldest railroad in the country still operating under its original name. Also the busiest railroad in North America, it carries 265,000 customers each weekday on 735 trains over 700 miles of track on 11 different branches. All but one branch converge at Jamaica Station, making it the railroad's hub. A complex system of interlocking switches and flyover tracks allows trains to move through the eight station tracks servicing the five passenger platforms. Jamaica Station houses the railroad's executive offices and the offices of the train movement director and the electric power director. The station and its interlocking track system have worked so well that, until recently, little changed in the nearly 100 years of operation. Through historic photographs, Jamaica Station chronicles the history of this nerve center of the Long Island Rail Road.