LIRR M-7’s on Wrong Island!

That's really beautiful modeling, SIRT - everywhere you look - it's great.

I used that second picture for a desk-top on the iPhone.

I never rode the Staten Island Rapid Transit, but saw them run to South Beach where we went swimming during the 1940's and at the St.George Ferry Terminal when I started to work for the Consolidated Edison Company of New York in 1960. Since Con Ed bought the Staten Island Edison Company in 1954, we saw many of the older substations that were built along the SIRT right-of-way such as at Livingston and Port Richmond between St. George and Arlington on the north shore and at Clifton, Old Town, Eltingville, Princes Bay, Atlantic on the present line between St. George and Tottenville. Several of those SI Ed substations were shared with the SIRT.

I was surprised to see those shiny new Long Island Railroad cars running by the Eltingville Substation while I was there one weekend around1971or 2 or 3. They looked so futuristic after seeing those 1925 vintage SIRT train cars that resembled the BMT Standards.
The electrical substation had Con Ed 33,000volt outdoor switchgear, transformers, oil circuit breakers and relays and inside the building beside some real old 4,000 volt switchgear were two AC/DC rotary converters that supplied the SIRT 600 volt third rail.

I spent the night piecing together some old 1925 blue print diagrams with tape to figure out the wiring circuits. Everything in that substation was subsequently retired (including me in 2002) , and after 1973 when Con Ed built the new Wainwright Substation adjacent to the old Eltingville, SIR in the 1990's replaced their old rotary converters with 600 volt rectifiers like the rest of the NYCTA.