The Hudson River Railroad reached Ossining on September 29, 1849,[1] opening the village up to industrial development along the waterfront and allowing farmers inland to ship their produce to the markets of New York City. Among the riverside industrial concerns benefiting from the railroad were the marble quarries at Sing Sing Prison, Benjamin Brandreth's pill factory (still extant a short distance up the river) and others. These businesses gradually supplanted the boat builders and docks that had occupied the riverfront in the early 19th century.
Originally the station building was at grade level. In 1914 the New York Central Railroad, which the Hudson River had long been merged into, built a new station, the current building, in the Renaissance Revivalstyle. It was placed on metal stilts to allow Main Street to pass over the tracks, eliminating the grade crossing that had been part of the original station.[4] Like the rest of the Hudson Line, the station became a Penn Central station once the NYC & Pennsylvania Railroads merged in 1968. Penn Central's continuous financial despair throughout the 1970s forced them to turn over their commuter service to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The station and the railroad were turned over to Conrail in 1976, and eventually became part of the MTA's Metro-North Railroad in 1983. In 2000, New York Waterways used the station as the eastern port for the Haverstraw–Ossining Pedestrian Ferry creating a link between the station and Central Rockland County.
References
^ ab"Hudson River Railroad". The Evening Post. New York, New York. October 2, 1849. p. 4. Retrieved December 8, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
^ abMETRO-NORTH 2018 WEEKDAY STATION BOARDINGS. Market Analysis/Fare Policy Group:OPERATIONS PLANNING AND ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT:Metro-North Railroad. April 2019. p. 6.
