This bad news has been making the rounds today ...scrooge is alive and well, living in Brooklyn!

By HUGH SON

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Train wrecker: Worker removes rails and ties at Conover St. last
week, effectively dashing Bob Diamond's hopes for Red Hook
trolley.

It's truly the end of the line for the Red Hook trolley.

The city is pulling up a two-block stretch of trolley tracks near
the Red Hook waterfront, paving over the derailed dreams of
Brooklyn's most ardent streetcar enthusiast.

The move brought Bob Diamond - whose life's mission has been to
return the clanging cars to Brooklyn - to tears last week as he
watched construction workers toil on Conover St.

He lamented that the line he envisioned as stretching from Red
Hook to downtown Brooklyn was never completed after the city
halted funding two years ago.

"The people running the city have no foresight and vision for the
future," said Diamond, 44, who said he spent $100,000 of his own
money on the tracks.

"I would say for the money they spent removing the tracks, they
could have just finished it," he added.

Unlike the Red Hook line's slow, fitful and incomplete creation
over the past decade, the work to remove tracks and freshly pave
over the streets will be swift, promised Matt Monahan, spokesman
for the city's Design and Construction Department.

"We'll be cleaning those blocks and removing tracks to make them
safe and drivable by January," Monahan said.

The uncompleted tracks, as well as garbage that had collected
there, made the streets impassable for cars, he added.

Meanwhile, the last remaining vestiges of Diamond's failed dream
- the historic trolley cars themselves - are in jeopardy.

Diamond was served with eviction papers demanding he remove five
historic trolley cars stored at the nearby Beard St. pier by the
end of this month. But the trolley cars are trapped there, he
said, because of an August 2001 barge accident that severed rail
lines.

"There's no way to get them out of the building short of cutting
them up into little pieces," Diamond said.

The trolley tracks that are being removed once led to a warehouse
on the Beard St. pier, where trolley cars would have rolled out
to pick up commuters.

Originally published on December 22, 2003

lamontdc@adelphia.net