1930 pic of PRR Newark

It enlarges nicely

https://digital.hagley.org/70_200_05467

In the lower left corner are four bridges over a street-- that's three tracks and a platform? Same east of the station?

Thanks for the pic. On the far right you can see, from top to bottom, the current Lackawanna bridge, current bridge st auto bridge, and what I think was the old H&M bridge,which is now PATH at Penn station,. I am having a senior moment, but this may have been 2 levels of tracks, the lower for local freight. Or the two level bridge may have been the old center st bridge, with upper level later converted to cars, at location of the PAC center, with train traffic into the 1950s..
who can straighten me out?

It seems that the H&M bridge and the Center St. bridge were one and the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Route_158 .
H&M had the upper deck, and local PRR freight coming from Harrison used the lower deck. After the H&M was rerouted to the new Newark Penn Station, the upper deck was converted to automobile traffic.
I don't understand what it says about the H&M being routed parallel to route 21. That would mean it crossed the Passaic Riv coming from Harrison, but then turned left . I thought the H&M moved to be more or less parallel to the NYP mainline through Harrison and over a modified Dock bridge right at Penn Station . Maybe this "parallel to 21" was a temporary thing while the modified Dock was built.
J S

The bridges referred to in the original post seem to be the CNJ branch to its Newark station, which offered through trains to Jersey City and mainline connections at Elizabethport. Underneath them is the PRR main line at the west end of their Newark station, which looks like the building at the east end with the triangular footprint, with very Victorian turrets or spires, the narrow end facing the street.

The Center St. bridge was used by H&M trains (the "rapid transit" mentioned in Wiki) serving the H&M station in Newark, called Park Place, until the AC electrification reached New York, at which time the H&M trains were rerouted to the new PRR Newark station -- which may have been unique in this country, and I believe still is, in having three levels of rail service: Public Service trolleys in the basement (light rail today), PRR and eastbound H&M one level above the street, and westbound H&M arriving two levels above the street, affording a wide "cattle chute" allowing arriving H&M passengers to descend directly to the principal westbound platform between tracks 3 and 4.

Looking at how the PATH tracks enter Dock Bridge from the east, which looks sort of like an afterthought with the flyover for the west bound track I always assumed that a single level the Dock Bridge came first , with the H&M using the lower level too, and then it was later renovations that put the 2nd level on Dock Bridge and current upper level at Penn Station. Wikipedia says the west Dock Bridge opened 1935, and the east Dock Bridge 1937 and was used by H&M but doesn't explicitly say the 2 levels were there from the start.
Anybody know for sure?
JS
The flyover was necessitated by the H&M using the farthest westbound track. Way back when, did the H&M have its own ROW and track from Exchange place to Newark, or did it use PRR tracks? If PRR tracks, were PRR and H&M segregated to different tracks? I know east and west of Journal square would have been different. I think I read somewhere that there was an agreement with PRR for H&M to handle all the local traffic from Newark (and before that Manhattan Transfer??) to Exchange place. But I don't know if that meant H&M ran the trains on PRR rails, etc. Of course, I would assume H&M needed dedicated 3rd rail as it used in the tunnels - I don't know when PRR electrified Newark to Exchange place. But H&M was running to Newark Park Place already in 1911 (electrified..) The modern route of the westbound PATH track seems a bit odd - coming from the east, right after the P&H bridge by the turnpike, where the PRR line to PSNY splits from the line to Exchange place , the PATH tracks split , with east and westbound on the far opposite sides of the tracks leading to Dock. How that came to be is I guess what I am asking about.
Enough rambling.

H&M had its own double-track line from Hudson Terminal, with stations at Exchange Place and Grove Street (as PATH does today), coming to the surface between the east- and westbound tracks of the PRR coming from Jersey City, as far as Journal Square; at the east end of which the PRR tracks spread apart and the H&M tracks spread out between them, forming this arrangement at Journal Square, reading from north to south:
PRR westbound*
H&M westbound
Platform as at present
H&M westbound and to yard west of JSQ
H&M eastbound and from yard (These 2 tracks used for orig. and term. 33rd St. trains)
Platform as at present
H&M eastbound to Hudson Terminal
PRR eastbound*
The H&M yard was between the westbound and eastbound tracks, and west of the yard the 4 tracks merged into 2 until they reached the PRR double-track line from Penn Station, at which the westbound track ducked under and came up on the north side. From that point there were 4 tracks until Manhattan Transfer, which had two island platforms, one for each direction between the respective tracks, as well as plenty of layover tracks for steam engines and DD1's, all of which disappeared after the AC electrification did away with Manhattan Transfer. Since then the 4 tracks continued until the east end of Harrison station, where the H&M track diverged from the outside track to the platform at Harrison, while the outside track was used by trains from Jersey City bound for Newark and beyond**. The opposite arrangement existed on the eastbound side -- H&M trains, which loaded between Tracks 1 and 2 at Newark, as they do today, rose up and over Track 1 to come down on the outside to reach the eastbound platform at Harrison.
* Until the K4's came off the North Jersey Coast line (1957?) the Broker came through there behind steam on those tracks five days a week -- after that, Baldwin sharknoses.
** At the home signal protecting the switch there was a smash board which came down to a level just above the height of an H&M train, displaying a lighted H-M when the switch was lined for the H&M platform. I don't know whether it was ever broken by a GG1 or MP54 (or K4!) -- there would have been hell to pay if it ever happened. Sometime after H&M became PATH the switch was removed, and that track today leads only to the Harrison platform. So the H&M trains used PRR tracks from the Hackensack River bridge to the switches at Harrison, and each H&M train appeared in the PRR employee timetable, with its own 5-digit train number with zero as the first digit. If there was an advertised connection with a westbound PRR train, the H&M train number matched it; the advertised connection for the Broadway was numbered 00029. They also had cab signals.

Under the ** reference mark, where it says that H&M trains used PRR tracks west of the bridge, it should read west of the west end of the yard at Journal Square.

I seem to recall that riding the H&M from Journal Square Jersey City to Newark, I purchased a paper ticket which was punched on the H&M train by a PRR uniformed conductor, and then the used ticket could be surrendered to the ticket agent at Newark for a partial (5 or 10 cents?) refund since the ticket was good to New York at a higher fare than Newark.

I forgot to mention that the Triumph series volume on New York has a lot of information about the whole Manhattan Transfer-Newark saga through the years.

pumpers wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:19 pm It seems that the H&M bridge and the Center St. bridge were one and the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Route_158 .
H&M had the upper deck, and local PRR freight coming from Harrison used the lower deck. After the H&M was rerouted to the new Newark Penn Station, the upper deck was converted to automobile traffic.
I don't understand what it says about the H&M being routed parallel to route 21. That would mean it crossed the Passaic Riv coming from Harrison, but then turned left . I thought the H&M moved to be more or less parallel to the NYP mainline through Harrison and over a modified Dock bridge right at Penn Station . Maybe this "parallel to 21" was a temporary thing while the modified Dock was built.
J S

I strongly suspect that the sentence is referencing H&M rerouted to go over the new Dock Bridge and being parallel to PRR mainline tracks; immediately south of the new Newark Penn Station, H&M was thus parallel to McCarter Highway a/k/a Route 21 south of Penn Station. I vaguely recall that at a young age, my parents drove over that upper level bridge going from shopping in Newark's large department stores to home in Bayonne. The reason was, I think, to visit the Two Guys from Harrison discount store, the original location of the eventual chain of stores.

Ken, ExCon, thank you for the replies. IIRC, from posts here, Ken worked in Newark for many years so you know it well.

I found 2 interesting maps - one is Manhattan Transfer showing the H&M ("Rapid Transit") and PRR main tracks - which must be from between 1911 (when H&M reached Newark Park Place) and ~1937, when the H&M re-routed to Penn Station and Manhattan transfer closed. http://www.northeast.railfan.net/classic/NYCity4.html
It looks a lot like today, except for the H&M going off the top to Park Place, presumably. Note the westbound H&M crosses under PRR main to New York already, east of where the tracks to Jersey City split off

The other is a track map of Dock and Hudson Interlockings from 1967 which includes the same area (and note the chart says installed in 1910 - so it goes back to Manhattan Transfer days) https://www.redoveryellow.com/position- ... s/dock.gif
It looks very similar to the pre-1937 chart above, except for the H&M west of the Manhattan Transfer area of course. It's easy to see that after 1937 they just kept the westbound H&M on the north side of the PRR tracks east of Manhattan Transfer all the way to the flyover at Dock Bridge - so I'm convinced now that the flyover was put in back when Dock bridge opened and the H&M first went to Newark Penn Station, not later.

And poking around, it seems that there were only 2 passenger tracks between Manhattan Transfer (and later Newark Penn) to Jersey City, as I think one of you pointed out.
I'll have to get one of those old Triumph books about the H&M.

One other (for Ken) - it seems as of 1930 the Newark subway was not there yet - the Morris Canal on the 1930 photo looks overgrown and there is no Raymond Blvd on top of it. I guess the subway didn't come until the new Newark Penn Station a few years later. Also I found interesting the "City Market" (so I saw it named on old Sanborn maps) a few blocks east of the CNJ freight warehouse. What's interesting is what looks like a brand new parking lot with lighting -- the beginning of the NJ malls with big parking lots, perhaps.
On that note, I was never at the Two Guys in Harrison, but I do remember trips to other Two Guys (and Korvettes) in the early 60's, I guess. https://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot ... -guys.html

Jim S