But starting Monday, the riders at the intermediate stops will have to go elsewhere. Last year, according to the L.I.R.R., three customers a day used the Haberman station, an easy-to-miss stop along Rust Avenue, just under the Kosciusko Bridge. The Penny Bridge station in Maspeth and the station at Richmond Hill had one daily rider each. The vast majority of commuters on this section of the Montauk line, which runs westbound once in the morning and eastbound twice in the afternoon, go directly between Long Island City and Jamaica, where passengers can transfer to electric trains to Long Island.

Ms. McDonald and Mr. Sullivan said they planned to start using the J train and a bus that stops on nearby Myrtle Avenue to get to and from Jamaica station.

In some ways, even more striking than the news of the station closings is that those along the Montauk branch have stayed open this long. The line was built in the mid-19th century by the L.I.R.R.'s main competitor, the South Side Rail Road, running from the ferry station at Long Island City along the industrial banks of Newtown Creek through the vast stretches of cemetery in Maspeth and Glendale and east to Richmond Hill and Jamaica.

L.I.R.R officials said they did not know how many commuters used these stations in the golden age of the Montauk branch. But news accounts at the time, said Vincent Seyfried, the author of a seven-volume history of the railroad, recorded nearly 5,000 riders in the summer of 1912 and more than 3,200 customers that winter.

It was probably around that time, Mr. Seyfried said, that the demise of the Montauk branch began. With the opening of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909 and the Midtown Tunnel in 1910, Queens commuters no longer had to ride the ferry into Manhattan -- which meant that they no longer had to ride the Montauk line to Long Island City.

The stations being closed this week also include three stops on the Montauk branch on the east end of Long Island -- Center Moriches, Quogue and Southampton campus -- as well as the Mill Neck station on the Oyster Bay branch and the Holtsville station on the Main line. The Long Island stations have 12 to 20 customers a day, but a L.I.R.R. spokeswoman, Susan McGowan, said the stops are all near more heavily used stations.

Last week, the news of the closings in Queens did not exactly alarm local residents. Across the street from the Richmond Hill station at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard, Tim Peters, a bartender at Cadigan's for the last 25 years, said he thought only freight trains used the tracks. ''Nobody ever came in here from that station,'' said Mr. Peters, 70, a lifelong resident of Richmond Hill.