Double Tracking of West Albany Hill

Years ago, in the early days of Conrail, I remember talks about reinstalling the second track on the West Albany Hill. There was talk about money from New York State and all sorts of good things. Well here it is 2004, close to 30 years after talk, and apparently that's all it was talk, the old NY Central route on the West Albany Hill is still single track. Does anyone out there know if there are any real plans to double track this section of the old main line?

This is doubtful. The fact is there is not nearly enough traffic to warrant this kind of capital investment. What would be the payoff? No ROI, no second track.

What line are we talking about? B+A Line? Where is it? I am not familiar with it?

thanks

ken

The passenger main via Albany is the location. The timetable I have at work is a few yrs old and has single track CP144 which looks like it's on east bank of Hudson River, just beyond Albany-Rensselaer Station, to CP 169 where the freight main via Selkirk hooks up with the passenger main. This was probably thought up back as far as NYC days.

eddiebear wrote:This was probably thought up back as far as NYC days.

It's not clear to me what you mean by this, and I'm not sure of the dates, but this line was single-tracked around the time NYC installed CTC and removed the other two main tracks west of Hoffmans. I'm thinking early 1960s....

I started riding the Central from GCT to Rochester in 1965 this was pre Empire Service. IIRC double track from Albany out to Hoffmans being removed in spring of 1966, it definitely was in place in 1965. I recall being surprised the eastbound was removed during one of my quarterly westbound trips. I always sat on the left side of the coach so I believe the eastbound was lifted and the westbound became the single main track.I remember it was mostly single track in the Empire service era.I stopped riding after 1971.

ALso, I remember there was a period of several years (beginning about 1972?) when some of this route, i.e., between the Carman cutoff and CP169, was taken out of service, and Amtrak trains took the Carman route to the Selkirk branch. While it was an interesting "Rare mileage" detour for some, most riders were glad to get the traditional route back!

This isn't a question of return on investment in a formal sense.

The proposal is to double track the original NYC passenger main up West Albany Hill from Rensselaer to Schenectady (and possibly beyond, to the junction with the Selkirk Branch at Hoffmans) to remove a scheduling bottleneck for Amtrak trains.

Currently, it's something like 20-25 miles of single track, with only one passing siding at the Schenectady Amtrak station. The Rensselaer-Schenectady section is used by 10 trains a day (the Adirondack, Ethan Allan, Lake Shore Limited, and two pairs of Niagara Falls trains). If one train gets late, it commonly cascades so that other trains get knocked off schedule also.

CSX only runs a couple of locals over this route. NY State had proposed double tracking so that Amtrak service could be improved , but CSX had refused to allow construction of the double track because it would raise their property tax bill significantly while offering them no significant benefit. Hard to fault them for that.

New York's famously disfunctional legislature sat on the issue for years, but finally removed the perverse taxation provision last session. But by then NY had run out of money and the level of cooperation between Amtak and NY State had deteriorated badly, in part due to the Turboliner fiasco.

I remember seeing two tracks on the hill in 1987. I had just started driving, and I used to spend alot of time around the hill.

The second track was torn up in the mid '90s. Like '95 or '96. I know I saw this. There were 2 tracks to at least West Albany from at least '87 untill '95.

My point is they replaced the second track once, why not do it again. The Post Road Branch, the second track southbound to CP-125, and the section from the Carmen Cutoff to CP-169 were also replaced. The Post Road only has two trains per day.

It's clear this section of the line is a bottleneck. I don't mind paying a little extra in tax to fix something like this.

DJ wrote:I remember seeing two tracks on the hill in 1987.

This second track you mention was (is?) a yard track that came down out of West Albany yard though a different cut -- with a split-rail derail on the upper end, connecting to Tivoli Hollow and over the Livingston Ave Bridge (LAB) to Renns and Troy. It was not removed at the time the second main track was removed, but was in use through throughout the period in question (Still is? I don't know).

The original two main line tracks went into Albany Union Station and over the Maiden Lane bridge (which was eliminated in the late 1960s) and extended all the way to Stuyvesant on the Hudson Division.

Indeed this is a bottleneck. But t resolve it, you have to 1) pay for it, and; 2) make it attractive for CSX to allow double tracking.

Second (yard) track is gone, so it is truly single track from just west of Broadway to the east end of West Albany yard.

I'm looking at the Broadway switch out my office window right now. It's a common meeting point, with CSX's Troy local often going in the hole there in mid afternoon for Amtrak to pass. Amtrak trains never meet here, however--evidently one of the tracks over the Livingston Ave bridge is freight only.

march hare wrote:Second (yard) track is gone, so it is truly single track from just west of Broadway to the east end of West Albany yard.

I assume then that West Albany yard is stub-ended on the East end. Is this true? I know Tivoli Hollow is long gone, as is the track that went over the main to Freihoffer bakery (?). West Albany is primarily a trans-load facility -- is it not?

I don't think it's stub ended, although as I sit here I guess I've never seen it switched from the east side.

Some of those transload tracks might be stub ended. I'll have to check when I go out that way this afternoon.

The matter of when this was single tracked hasn't been agreed on in this thread yet . . . I'd like to know. I vaguely recall (and may certainly be wrong about this) 2 tracks in the early Empire Service, early PC period.

Now, here's another question: was this route once four-tracked? And is so, when was it reduced 4 to 2 tracks?

I am looking at NY Central Timetable No.22 11/5/67 and it looks like it certainly had been 4 tracks that were mostly reduced to 2 at that time.

Here is the track designations from that TT:

B, MP143.1 and 1, 143.3 Tracks: 1, 2
1, MP143.3 and Rock Cut, MP145.2 Tracks: 4, 1, 2
Rock Cut, MP145.2 and MP146.0 Tracks: 1, 2
MP146.0 and CP2, MP146.9 Tracks: 3, 1, 2
CP2, MP146.9 and Carman, MP156.4 Tracks: 1, 2
Carman, MP156.4 and CP9, MP161.9 Tracks: 4, 1, 2
CP9, MP161.9 and CP11, MP169.9 Tracks: 1, 2

The Conrail TT from 4/27/86 shows:

CP1 to CP3 Single Track
CP3 to CP4 Tracks 1 & 2
CP4 to Rock Cut Tracks 1 & 4
Rock Cut to CP169 Single Track

It look like it was gradually reduced from 4 track to single track beginning in the NY Central era and continuing with PC and Conrail.