Culver Shuttle

About CulverShuttle.com

By Larry Fendrick
As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I always had a fascination for subways. The first few years of my life, I lived about a half block away from the IND Culver Line which at the time in the early 60's was the "D" train. Below the elevated Culver line, steel rails still lay in McDonald Avenue even though the trolleys that ran on them had ceased operation several years before my birth. These tracks would occasionally see a train of the South Brooklyn Railway (SBK), running along the street on MacDonald Avenue. When I would accompany my parent's into Manhattan, I would always insist on riding in the first car so I could peer out the front window. Before the train would dip into the tunnel portal between Ditmas and Church Aves., I would notice a strange train sitting on the edge of the Ditmas Avenue station, it's elevated track curving off into the distance, and would wonder what strange land did that train travel to? Then in my fifteenth year, (1975) I read a newspaper article announcing the end of the Culver Shuttle and I knew I must finally ride this mysterious line and capture it on film for posterity. Many of the images on this site were taken with my old Argus 126 Instamatic camera. I also took many 8mm movies of the Culver Shuttle with my Kodak Super 8mm Instamatic movie camera. The film I took with these cameras were developed at Finecraft Photo, under the shadow of the Culver Line's Avenue N station. Although later in my life I became a professional photographer, it was not until a year or so after the Culver Shuttle shut down that I obtained my first "real" camera. If you have any comments or suggestions you can contact me at: