Garden City-Mitchel Field Secondary

Garden City–Mitchell Field Secondary
Overview
System	Long Island Rail Road
Status	Freight
Termini	Clinton Road Central Park
Stations	11
Operation
Opened	1870s
Owner	Long Island Rail Road
Operator(s)	Long Island Rail Road
Technical
Number of tracks	2
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm)

The Garden City–Mitchell Field Secondary is a lightly used freight branch of the Long Island Rail Road. It is a spur off the Hempstead Branch.

The trackage of the Garden City–Mitchell Field Secondary, originates back to the 1870s to the Central Railroad of Long Island (CRRLI). Built by Alexander Turney Stewart, the CRRLI was a mix use passenger and freight railroad extending from Flushing all the way through central Long Island to Bethpage, passing through the towns of Floral Park, Garden City, Plainedge, and Island Trees. Later on Stewart extended the line south to the Babylon shore line. This portion of the railroad would come to be referred to as the Babylon Extension. At Flushing the railroad had trackage rights with the Flushing and North Side Railroad to access their Long Island City terminal where passengers could then connect to the East River ferries that would take them into Manhattan. Additionally Stewart built a branch line, which deviated from the railroad's mainline at Garden City, to Hempstead. Stewart at the time was developing Garden City as one of the first planned suburban communities. The CRRLI would play important role in that it was used to transport materials from Stewart's brickwork's in Bethpage to his construction sites in Garden City, and later on allow Garden City residents to commute into Manhattan.

In 1876 the CRRLI, in conjuncture with other competing railroads on Long Island, was absorbed by the Long Island Rail Road and its president Conrad Poppenhausen. Poppenhausen, and his later successor Austin Corbin, would merge the Central into the LIRR system. The Central between Flushing and the National Rifle Range in Queens, later to become the Creedmoor Rifle Range and later Creedmoor State Hospital, was deemed redundant and abandoned after the railroads merger in 1879, although its tracks remained in place until about World War I. The portion of rail between Creedmoor and Floral Park was eventually downgraded to a secondary freight track, known as the Creedmoor Branch, that for the most of the 20th century would service Creedmoor State Hospital with daily coal deliveries. The portion of trackage from Floral Park to Babylon became known as the Central Branch of the LIRR. A connection was made west of Floral Park allowing the railroad to access the LIRR mainline which would afford the branch its connection to Long Island City and the LIRR's connecting hub Jamaica Station.

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