Re: NNG: Jay Street Connecting RR (Brooklyn, NY)

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S. Berliner III
In my listing of early predecessor units on the main Boxcabs page, I seem to have overlooked a very significant early locomotive that Jay Bendersky says was "considered by many to be the prototype for the age of dieselization that was to follow". This was the Jay Street Connecting Railroad's 1915 GE 45-ton gasoline-engined center-cum-boxcab #3. She was sort of like the U.S.S. Monitor, "a cheesebox on a raft", in that she was neither fish nor fowl, having a 175HP gasoline engine in a teensy cab sitting all alone on a big flat chassis, so she was either a center cab, as Bendersky calls her, or a boxcab with huge platforms on either end. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer cherce; I'll compromise and dub her another of my "honorary" boxcabs. She is shown in a Harold Fagerberg photo, taken 19 Oct 48 (when she was already 33 years old) at the Jay Street enginehouse, on page 10 of Bendersky's 1988 "Brooklyn's Waterfront Railways - A Pictorial Journey". Jay (Bendersky, not the street) notes that her cab was removed and her guts stripped out and the chassis converted to a float reach car