Railroad apartment

A railroad apartment or railroad flat, sometimes referred to as a floor-through apartment, is an apartment with a series of rooms connecting to each other in a line. The name comes from the layout's similarity to that of a typical (mid-20th century or earlier) passenger train car. Without hallways, it results in less semi-public space. This style is most common in New York City, San Francisco, and their surrounding areas. Railroad apartments are common in tenement buildings or even modern apartment blocks, and are sometimes found in subdivided brownstones. Railroad apartments first appeared in New York City in the mid-19th century, and were designed to provide a solution to urban overcrowding. Many early railroad apartments were extremely narrow, and most buildings were five or six stories high. Few early buildings had internal sanitation, and bathrooms emptied raw sewage into the back yard. In some cases, one family would take up residence in each room, with the exterior hallway… Read by Clay2004. Recorded August 29, 2026; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1268338638 Article today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_apartment Original recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:En-Railroad-apartment-article.ogg License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). This episode is a format-shifted (MP3) copy redistributed under the same license. Chapter images come from the recorded article via Wikimedia Commons; each chapter links its file page for credits. This show is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation.