Interlocking Walkthrough: ROCKY

ROCKY interlocking, which, before you ask, is not in Far Rockaway, and is instead the key to an interlocking to the brand new spur station to the Rockies, just kidding. It’s instead 2,750 feet east of you guessed it, Rockville Centre. This small little interlocking on The Montauk Branch is 20 miles away from Long Island City by rail.

This interlocking is extremely simple in nature and is essentially a copy of its neighbors’ AMITYVILLE and WANTAGH.

This interlocking first entered service on April 30, 1983, and has been controlled by VALLEY or BABYLON ever since.  Interestingly, on the morning this interlocking entered service, the railroad set up a temporary block station at the site of the crossovers. That block station has the distinction of only being in service for one day!

As you can see there’s not much to say about tiny little ROCKY interlocking. This interlocking is bordered by PORT interlocking to the east, and VALLEY interlocking to the west. 

Interlocking Walkthrough: AMITYVILLE

Happy New Year! To kickoff our first post of 2025, let’s discuss our second interlocking, with that being Amityville, which is not actually in Amityville itself, it’s actually in Massapequa, but it’s right next to Amityville station, hence it’s name.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that all it is is a right-hand switch followed by a right-hand switch, and you’ll also notice that while Amityville station sits in Suffolk County, AMITYVILLE interlocking actually sits on the other side of the county border in Massapequa.

Switches 

AMITYVILLE is a very simple interlocking. It only has two switches (going east to west:) from Montauk 1 (the westbound track) to Montauk 2 (the eastbound track), and from Montauk 2 (the eastbound track) back to Montauk 1 (the westbound track)

These switches are barely used, especially nowadays as trains don’t terminate in Massapequa Park much anymore, therefore, it’s only used to switch a couple of trains during rush hours, but other than that, they don’t see much use.

Signals

AMITYVILLE has the modern, tri-colored signals, found in similar interlockings such as WANTAGH and PD. Here's a photo of the signals from a friend of mine, MrMaster767:

Towers

There’s no switch tower at AMITYVILLE interlocking, instead all movements are controlled from VALLEY tower, a bit west to Valley Stream.

Neighbors

AMITYVILLE is neighbored to the west by WANTAGH interlocking (a very similar interlocking), and is neighbored to the east by BABYLON interlocking, a much more complex interlocking in and around Babylon and yard.

This should do it for AMITYVILLE. If you have any questions, comments, or things you’d like to see covered in the future, please contact me at gavin.s.wilcox@gmail.com