Bay Ridge Branch issues

Garbage truck short cut collapsed part of a part of a parking lot over the tracks.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bro ... -1.2361310" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Yikes!
NY&A is having a bad week...
Weak parking lot or overloaded truck?

Sounds like the lot was not designed for loaded trucks. I hope whoever owns the lot gets to hold the truck ransom until the company pays up for repairs - apparently they had no business driving through there.

Re: Bay Ridge Branch issues
by DogBert » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:51 pm
Sounds like the lot was not designed for loaded trucks. I hope whoever owns the lot gets to hold the truck ransom until the company pays up for repairs - apparently they had no business driving through there.


To quote Rodney Dangerfield from "Back to School," I don't know if you know who runs that business, but I can assure you it's not the Boy Scouts! "

Wonder if the lot had Load Limit signs posted at the entry/exit points,Company and Driver are on the hook if
the Load Limit signs were ignored.
Park a C+D gon under the truck,and drop it in the gon for removal

With CSX in "Fire Sale" mode,Would the NYC or NY State,buy the freight trackage from Fremont to Oak point and turn it over to NY&A to operate?
Or would P&W(G&W) take over all CSX freight rights in the NYC metro area?

Intriguing....

Is Fremont just another name for Fresh Pond? Some sort of division post or timetable station location?

Fremont was a tower on the NY Connecting RR(the Hellgate route)that was manned by NH RR operators, was an interlocking and interchange point
to the LIRR. The ROIW is elevated above the LIRR and NYCTA subway tracks. PC abandoned this tower before CR's creation.
Fresh Pond is a station/yard office on LIRR's lower Montauk Branch,between LI City and Jamaica.
Fremont is used as a boundary point between CSX and NY&A ,CSX runs from Oak Point Yard to Fremont to interchange cars with NY&A.
NY&A runs to Bay Ridge to interchange with the PANYNJ's NJNY RR a switching shortline in Bay Ridge and Greenville NJ and runs the last
Carfloat operation across the Harbor in NYC area. There's a rarely used interchange to the South Brooklyn RY,a part of the NYCTA Subway system.

Fremont is considered to be "upstairs" and Fresh Pond is considered "downstairs" due to the elevation change between the 2 ROWs.

AT certain times at Fremont the RR that ran and switched Bay Ridge yard was shared between NH/PC/CR and LIRR,that changed with CR's
breakup and LIRR/MTA contracting out the freight service on LIRR.
This is a "Cliff notes" history of this area.

Backshop did you ever read the story of the kid who climbed on a boxcar got electrocuted and sued? I believe it’s (one) of the reasons why the wires were turned off. It happened in the late fifties. Can’t remember where I read the story but no details were provided only highlights. There was details of the litigation surrounding this incident, I believe a second kid was electrocuted some years after the first. It’s an interesting read if you know of the interchange.

I believe Penn Central turned off the electricity on Day One of the merge, in 1968, and operated the Bay Ridge as a diesel-powered secondary, as did Conrail, 1976-on, until the LIRR bought the line in 1984.

Not surprised that a few kids learned the hard way(fatally)that the catenary was live,after the PC "shotgun" merger,
the EP-5's and the E-33's were yanked over to the PRR side of the wire,electric powered freights were gone on the old New Haven,
The Cos Cob power plant was starting to fail on a regular basis,so no surprise that PC killed the Bay Ridge Branch wire and that part of the
the old New Haven Grid,that was feed off the West Farms Substation in the Bronx.

Towards the end of Fremont Tower the LI was contracted to staff the tower, and I had worked with a couple of guys that worked it. It was a real sleeper, only a few trains for one open tour. One guy recounted that it was one of the few jobs where the operator used a power panel (not done on LI, that was ET's work) and talked to the NH load dispatcher at Cos Cob along with their train dispatcher. He recalled having to deal with the power from a sub partway up towards Hellgate called Bowery Bay, and then dealt with the ones south of Fremont, which were fed with a sub just south of the ENY tunnels, with other subs at "college" (which also had a remote interlocking at one point also) and at the end of the branch at bay ridge. Those were fed from ConEd to that big substation just south of the tunnels. That sub may have fed into both the LI and the subway at one time, it's huge. At that time the NH ran straight through and the LI was used to do local service, their track was the western most tunnel and ran to New Lots as a secondary track. Forgot what he said occurred after that.

While there was problems with kids and the wire (still occurs rarely in CT, remember a kid from a nearby town doing it after a GDead concert in the '80s), the main reason the PC killed it was part of the plan to stop floating from Bay Ridge. Why float when you can go up the Hudson and down the other shore, with the resulting mileage. The second the PC could wiggle out of the contract the the LI the tower was immediately closed and interchange went to Fremont (now a yard) and the freight clerk at Pond controlled the branch south of Fremont after that. It was a tough job according to a conductor who once worked down there and he didn't have many happy memories, "war zone" was frequently used, especially for the work at night. The tracks were in bad shape back then, and no one was cleaning up the rampant dumping that was going on back then.