Below is a diagram of HOLLIS. Note how the interlocking is only Mainline track 4. Tracks 1, 3, and 2 are not within the interlocking limits at all here:
HOLLIS, which gets its name from the nearby station just to its west, is located twelve miles away from Long Island City on the Mainline. As mentioned before, it is only an interlocking on Mainline track 4, not 1, 3, or 2. The official eastern and western limits of this interlocking are the two big signal gantries to either side of the switch.
HOLLIS is very simple in nature. There is one switch off of Mainline 4 onto the Hillside Yard lead. The southernmost track (represented by the black line at the bottom) feeds directly into the Hillside Yard and Maintenance Facility.
The track splits off of Mainline 4 and runs parallel to the main for roughly 0.4 miles before it swoops around Hollis' eastbound platform (essentially making that an island platform, though a fence along the south side of that platform would inhibit boarding a train on the yard lead).
Fairly unimportant but worth noting, Hollis' station platform is one of the two platforms in the system made out of wood. Boland's Landing is the other.
Position light signals on the two gantries that mark the limits of the interlocking control train movements through the area. There are only signals for track 4 and the yard lead on those gantries, though. There are no signals over tracks 1, 3, or 2.
A swift 80 m.p.h. is the speed limit through the area. The nearest interlocking to the east is QUEENS interlocking, and to the west the next interlocking you would come across would be the massive HALL interlocking.
The exact history of towers at HOLLIS is a bit fuzzy to me. Canvassing Steve Lynch's Trains Are Fun.com LIRR history site turned up some stuff about the old Hollis depot and a tower of some sort just to the east of the station. But the Mainline was configured very differently back then. First of all, there was an interlocking called PARK just west of Floral Park and that's where the Hempstead Branch tracks used to split off. That has been moved to QUEENS interlocking today, and currently that's where trains separate.
After some web surfing, I think I can fairly confidently say that there was never a tower at the current HOLLIS interlocking that we know today. Currently the interlocking is controlled from QUEENS, just to the east.
That wraps up this week's interlocking walkthrough. Next week we'll visit HUNT a ways to the east, near Huntington. And in two weeks time we visit the king of them all--JAY!
LIRR historian (and former HALL tower operator) Art Huneke has a discussion of the early history of HOLLIS (formerly IS) interlocking in the context of the early electrification to Belmont Park here:
ReplyDeletehttp://arrts-arrchives.com/elbelmont.html
The first IS tower was apparently opened on the west side of Hollis station in 1894, but was moved to the east side (the current location of HOLLIS) in 1905 in preparation for the opening of Holban Yard (now Hillside Facility) the following year. Holban was once the LIRR's main freight yard, handling all traffic moving to or from points east of Jamaica, so this one little switch at HOLLIS was pretty important in its day!
Art's site is an amazing resource on LIRR history and is well worth exploring, but it can be very maze-like and difficult to navigate as it lacks any kind of useful index or contents page.