This railroad observe hasn’t carried a practice throughout central Queens in 63 years, and it’s more unusual and extra stunning for it. The Lengthy Island Rail Highway’s Rockaway Seaside Department as soon as supplied a 30-minute journey from Manhattan to New York Metropolis’s ocean seashores. Alongside the best way it traversed three and a half miles of parkland valleys, earthen embankments and concrete viaducts from Forest Hills to Ozone Park.

The road was deserted in 1962. And so nature pursued its messy designs. Forests grew. Sign towers fell. Coyotes colonized the darkish bramble. In Rego Park, a bit of observe got here unmoored from its fastening pins, and the rock ballast eroded. The observe swayed free within the wind. A seedling fell between the stones. It turned a crimson maple tree that grew and caught the rail, folding the metal I-beam into its bulbous trunk.

On a cold day final winter, Jason Hofmann leaned down, framed the scene along with his iPhone and took an image.

“I like the best way the branches transfer within the wind — it creates fascinating geometry with the railroad tracks,” stated Jason, 17, who lives close by and sometimes walks the deserted tracks. “It seems like nature taking up a warfare zone.”

Many of the previous practice line is managed by New York’s Division of Citywide Administrative Companies. The center part, a mile-long stretch by way of Forest Park, is open to the general public. The remaining lies behind razor wire, wobbly fences and hillsides of poison ivy. Just a few neighbors improvise methods to get inside, as do a handful of people that sleep beneath tarps.

“It’s beautiful,” stated Travis Terry, who lives in Forest Hills, three blocks from the previous line. “It’s been untouched for 60 years, so you have got these nice timber. You’re in a forest and then you definately assume to your self, ‘Wait, I’m in New York Metropolis!’”

The locals are joined by particularly ardent city explorers, a few of whom take a number of buses and subway trains to get there. They benefit from the deserted line for its decayed magnificence, and since so few individuals comprehend it’s there.

“It’s beneath the radar as a result of it’s in Queens, and it’s laborious to get to,” stated Jeff Seal, a train-loving performer who filmed himself strolling the whole line. The video has received 12,000 views since he posted it on YouTube six years in the past, which hasn’t executed a lot to boost the Rockaway department’s profile. “I like that it’s hidden in plain sight,” he stated.

The place could not stay hidden for lengthy. Mr. Terry leads Buddies of the QueensWay, a nonprofit that hopes to show the deserted practice line right into a linear park just like the Excessive Line in Manhattan. The group has acquired $154 million in grants from town and the federal authorities, sufficient to finish the primary mile and a half of park building.

“It’s essential for us to make the most of each inch,” Mr. Terry stated.

As a result of the Rockaway department is in New York Metropolis, even this forgotten wasteland has become contested ground. A competing group, known as QueensLink, hopes to revive practice service aboveground, with a brand new tunnel connecting the department to the subway system. Price estimates begin round $4 billion and balloon to $9 billion. The group has received $400,000 to review the rail thought from the U.S. Division of Transportation — the identical company that additionally gave $117 million to QueensWay to construct its park.

“It’s a outstanding useful resource that must be used,” stated Neil C. Giannelli, 70, who has lived alongside the road for twenty-four years and helps QueensLink.

Within the meantime, the Rockaway department grows extra stunning for its disuse. To spend a yr trespassing the previous tracks is to benefit from the infinite overlapping riot of issues planted and lifeless, constructed up and falling aside.

If the Rockaway Seaside Department turns into a park in Queens it is going to be thanks partially to the success of the High Line, one other once-abandoned practice line that opened as a park beginning in 2009 and now attracts vacationers from world wide.

Robert Hammond is a co-founder of Buddies of the Excessive Line, which led the redevelopment effort. To promote his imaginative and prescient, Mr. Hammond requested the photographer Joel Sternfeld if he may take a number of snapshots of the deserted practice line.

Between his picture books and museum exhibitions, together with a present on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in 1984, Mr. Sternfeld was among the many most celebrated artwork photographers on this planet. He agreed to assist the Excessive Line, however not for cash. His solely request was time.

“I want a yr of unique entry,” Mr. Sternfeld recalled telling the group.

Mr. Sternfeld received his yr, and keys to the deserted line. The moist spring dried. Summer time weeds bloomed. Although the Excessive Line within the Nineties was a refuge for artists and teenage thrill seekers, Mr. Sternfeld’s photos included no individuals. As a substitute they centered on faint trails bushwhacked into thickets of invasive Ailanthus timber. His photos, stuffed with leaden skies and muted auburn bramble, lent the Excessive Line the mystique it wanted to land highly effective backers, Mr. Hammond stated, together with Diane von Furstenberg and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“For me, it was the seasons,” Mr. Sternfeld stated in a current interview. “I’ve at all times been within the seasons, and the altering of the seasons.”

1 / 4 century later, the undertaking to redevelop the Rockaway department is in the identical early part because the Excessive Line was when Mr. Sternfeld walked it. Yellow lichens dot the rusted metal like polka dots on a necktie. Flocks of blue jays march down the cover like columns of troopers, squawking and unafraid. Behind an condominium tower in Rego Park, a high-banked ridge gave manner and buried the rail line beneath a slow-moving avalanche of soil.

On a heat day final summer season, Alex Cotter left the sidewalk by Yellowstone Boulevard and scrambled onto the steep embankment to the Rockaway department, utilizing tree roots as handholds to tug himself up. He hoped to see an opossum. As a substitute he was trapped, dense Ailanthus blocking all northern progress, greenbrier thorns to the south.

“I at all times thought it might be fascinating to go up there, I simply by no means truly did it,” stated Mr. Cotter, 28, who grew up close to the road in Rego Park. “Possibly I’ll come again when it’s chilly.”

Beneath the Yellowstone Boulevard bridge lies a triangle-shaped lot that after was a dumping floor for televisions and automobile batteries. A decade of free labor turned it into the Compost Collective, the place trash is sorted by volunteers and chickens peck each other in a double-decker coop.

On the collective’s winter picnic this December, Anuradha Hashemi stood within the shadow of the quiet practice bridge and saved watch over her son’s first bonfire.

“Mother!” stated the boy, Obi, 6. “My marshmallow is on hearth!”

Within the early 2000s, Patrick Mohamed purchased a tall, slender home in Woodhaven. His again patio led to a cinder-block wall. Simply past the wall, the Rockaway department’s embankment rose in a hillside of weeds and trash.

Now Mr. Mohamed is 63, grey on the temples however nonetheless fast along with his steps. A chilly day in February discovered him in his driveway surrounded by metal barbells, finishing his each day workout routines. Mr. Mohamed walked to the again of his property, hopped two steps carved into the cinder blocks and climbed into his backyard, on land appropriated from the previous practice line.

Raised tomato beds climbed the hill like a staircase. They had been topped with trellises for lengthy beans and bitter melons and small-gauge display screen to maintain the rabbits out. The place the hill crests, fats terra cotta planters crammed with barren soil prolonged Mr. Mohamed’s area all the best way throughout the primary set of tracks.

In all places else in New York, land rights are adjudicated to the sq. inch. On the Rockaway department, issues are looser. Some householders maintain their backyards flush with the property line laid down by the railroad. Many have edged their fences again a number of toes, claiming area for a shed, a foosball desk or a rope swing. Few of Mr. Mohamed’s neighbors are wanting to see the road repurposed as a park, which could convey nosy strangers to their yard retreats.

“I’m fearful about individuals trying in, hurting our privateness,” stated Lasha Revia, 46, who carved a stone-lined terrace into the embankment the place he hosts household gatherings in summer season.

However nobody else alongside the whole three-and-a-half-mile line has pursued a marketing campaign of territorial growth as profitable as Mr. Mohamed’s.

“I constructed this over 24 years,” he stated. “I did it a little bit piece at a time.”

One man can impose solely a lot order on a spot so riotous. Somewhat than really feel discouraged by the dysfunction, Mr. Mohamed greets it with delight. In summer season, when the backyard pruning is completed, he retires to his again deck. He watches darkness descend at its personal celestial tempo.

“At evening it will get actually darkish again right here,” he stated. “We get nice stars, and the moon comes out actually clear.”