National Docks/lines in Hoboken and Jersey City

That industry under the Lincoln tunnel helix was Henkels soap company. We used to put tank cars in there. Sometimes the River line DS would tell you to hold at Baldwin ave grade crossing until the cops got in position down at the projects. In my era running over that section ,1970 till 1983, the Penn Central cops would catch those vandals and beat the hell out of them pre PC pardon the pun political correct days. One night PR-7 which was a hot westbound North Bergen to East St Louis manifest was rolling thru the projects when the punks set an auto on fire and rolled it down the hill into the engines. It looked like an old west indian attack when they would send a burning covered wagon into the settlers.Another night my train NE-2 was cut when the creeps turned an angle cock on the next to last car, a piggyback flat with a trailer full of Gallo wine, and the caboose. My trainman was holed up in the cab with his 45 cal Army issue Colt ready to blast the first one thru the door but the cops were right there. He said they caught one of them and beat him to a pulp. Almost all road trainmen carried guns back then fighting off wild dog attacks or as weapons of last resort in self defense.

Like Golden Arm sez track speed was 25 but many a night I ran thru there at 40 mph or better, wide open and a few pounds of air to keep the slack stretched. The National Docks branch was shut down just before CR day 4/1/76 due to structural problems.As a newly minted fireboy I caught a few "Coal - 4 extras" off the LV at BAY tower with an LV pilot engineer over the docks to Weehawken but they quit running around early 1972. Johnston ave was as far as you could go until IIRC 1978 or so when CR decided to fix up the bridges down by National jct. The night it reopened Bobby Sharlew an EL engineer ran the first thru freight over it with Road Foreman Don Nagle as his pilot. I ran the second train over it which was the lite power for TV-59 up to North Bergen from 91 Bay. NOEL do you remember the(ex NYC) Weehawken yardie, Whitey ?

Zeke wrote:That industry under the Lincoln tunnel helix was Henkels soap company. We used to put tank cars in there. Sometimes the River line DS would tell you to hold at Baldwin ave grade crossing until the cops got in position down at the projects. In my era running over that section ,1970 till 1983, the Penn Central cops would catch those vandals and beat the hell out of them pre PC pardon the pun political correct days. One night PR-7 which was a hot westbound North Bergen to East St Louis manifest was rolling thru the projects when the punks set an auto on fire and rolled it down the hill into the engines. It looked like an old west indian attack when they would send a burning covered wagon into the settlers.Another night my train NE-2 was cut when the creeps turned an angle cock on the next to last car, a piggyback flat with a trailer full of Gallo wine, and the caboose. My trainman was holed up in the cab with his 45 cal Army issue Colt ready to blast the first one thru the door but the cops were right there. He said they caught one of them and beat him to a pulp. Almost all road trainmen carried guns back then fighting off wild dog attacks or as weapons of last resort in self defense.

Like Golden Arm sez track speed was 25 but many a night I ran thru there at 40 mph or better, wide open and a few pounds of air to keep the slack stretched. The National Docks branch was shut down just before CR day 4/1/76 due to structural problems.As a newly minted fireboy I caught a few "Coal - 4 extras" off the LV at BAY tower with an LV pilot engineer over the docks to Weehawken but they quit running around early 1972. Johnston ave was as far as you could go until IIRC 1978 or so when CR decided to fix up the bridges down by National jct. The night it reopened Bobby Sharlew an EL engineer ran the first thru freight over it with Road Foreman Don Nagle as his pilot. I ran the second train over it which was the lite power for TV-59 up to North Bergen from 91 Bay. NOEL do you remember the(ex NYC) Weehawken yardie, Whitey ?

Bobby Lederman, Bill Kidder and Whitey but I can't remember his last name. There were a couple more too, all good people
to work with. Also Yacobelis, Nicholosi, Bob Malinowski and Myers but I can't remember his first name again all good
people to work with.
I worked with some really good railroaders on the River Line and a very small minority who were not so good too.
Noel Weaver

Noel,


I'll drop a few names and see if you remember them...Eddie Marcella, Shad Birdsong and Jimmy Leathers. These guys were all Cdrs I worked with when I hired back in 1989. By that time Eddie Marcella had at least 45yrs...

Rich C

Nicholosi there's a name I haven't heard in a 100 years. That Weehawken yardmasters radio could be heard for miles. We were only qualified as far as CP-5 back then as our seniority district ended there.Once in a blue moon we would take auto racks up to Bellmans but mostly relieve Penn side trains going to Morrisville, Pot yard or Enola at 69th street.Do you remember the Christmas eve 1970 head on they had up around the NJ/ NY state line when the nortbound crew was overcome by diesel fumes in the cab. I heard the whole thing unfold on the radio as the River line DS was trying to raise him after he went past three CP's displaying red signals. He got a southbound to tie it down and get the hell off cause " this guy is coming and we cant stop him." Sent chills down the spine. I think the DS was Jimmy Post ?

fastfrt1 wrote:Noel,


I'll drop a few names and see if you remember them...Eddie Marcella, Shad Birdsong and Jimmy Leathers. These guys were all Cdrs I worked with when I hired back in 1989. By that time Eddie Marcella had at least 45yrs...

Rich C

Eddie Marcella was one of the top maybe ten conductors whom I worked with in my entire career. One of the most
conscientious conductors on anybody's railroad and an absolute gentleman to work with. I also worked with Jimmy Leathers
but I do not recall Shad Birdsong although I think I heard the name mentioned. Jimmy Post, Frank Bailley, Al Roscoe and
Ray Skotek were the four dispatchers who were normally working the River Line during 1974 and 1975. Later on the old
timers retired and others came on the scene. I enjoyed working that line especially once we got north of the New Jersey -
New York state line.
Noel Weaver

Here are some more photos I found. Also because rail yards are in bad areas throughout the country (Newark, Los Angeles, Hunts Point,...) Are train crews allowed to carry guns?

Thanks

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=758807

http://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=83601&nseq=169

http://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=46606&nseq=191

http://www.thebluecomet.com/croakisland.html

How about Gower, Harrington or Aranda? Two hoggers, and a con. I was riding with Harrington one day, and we had a student engineer on board. (remember Hoboken Bob, FF?) Harrington was trying to "teach" Hoboken, but Hoboken kept refering to his TT, and cheatsheet, trackchart, etc. Finally Harrington got "upset", crossed the cab, grabbed all of the guys materials, and sailed them out the window, running 50 mph. He was a real way-out guy!!! That Harrington always kept ya on yer toes........ I had Birdsong on a SEOI one trip, and we had to set out at Kingston, and North Bergen, with the balance going to the Island. We were crossing Upper Bay, when we got a call to report to the TM at OI, as soon as we got in. Seems Shad had forgotten his paperwork at Selkirk, and had been making his cuts, "where they looked like they should be". That's what he told Kiley. It looked like enough cars to set out. Needless to say, all of the cars were wrong....... I did make a trip with Eddie, when they came out to photograph him, for a safety poster. Seems he had worked 50 years, without an injury, so they immortalized him, on a giant safety poster. Eddie was a little "rough" around the edges, but once he decided he liked you, he was a real pussycat! Those were some real great guys, from that District F. Regards


for FL9: carry guns in Jersey? Whadaya, crazy?!?!?! hehehe

FL9711 wrote:Here are some more photos I found. Also because rail yards are in bad areas throughout the country (Newark, Los Angeles, Hunts Point,...) Are train crews allowed to carry guns?

Thanks

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=758807

http://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=83601&nseq=169

http://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=46606&nseq=191

http://www.thebluecomet.com/croakisland.html

No. Train crews are not allowed to carry guns. Judging by all the stories posted here, the "war zone" certainly earned its name!!

Noel Weaver wrote:

GOLDEN-ARM wrote:I imagine the projects are still there. As far as you seeing trains there all the time, I understand that there's no more freight railroading going by those projects. Are you sure you aren't seeing a different section of the Docks? The projects would have been east of Patterson Plank Road, which ran atop the bluff, and the projects should be located somewhere between 12th street and 16th street, around Madison and Monroe. Maybe a map search could help. They are big, 12-15 story brick project towers, not hard to miss. The projects were located just south of a sharp "S" curve, that took the tracks away from Patterson Plank to the edge of the water, to what would have been Weehawkin Yard. I would imagine the light rail follows the same route, as the route was already there as a railroad........

Although it has been a long time since I ran a train over this line,the above regarding the "Hoboken Projects" as we called
them seems to be about it. 14th Street goes over the line on a high bridge and that might be just barely north of the
bad area but I am not positive. I wonder if 14th Street might be the remnant of the old trolley elevated that went through
Hoboken, it looks possible to me but others probably know more about this than I do.
There were three grade crossings in the area all of which had gates and flashers; from north to south they were Paterson
Plank Road presently listed on DeLorme as Franklin Street, Ravine Road presently listed as New York Avenue and
Hoboken Avenue which still is listed as Hoboken Avenue. Incidentally the area where we often had flooding problems was
around these crossings especially the southern most two, Ravine Road and Hoboken Avenue.
Usually there were at least two and sometimes three police cars spread out over this area to watch us by. Another thing,
we often got clobbered by rocks and sometimes the windows got busted so bad that we would either have to turn the power
at Weehawken or change the power out because of destroyed windows and particles of broken glass everywhere. We did
not have the type of glass in those days that they have today.
There were two other areas around New York City that were also very bad, the lead to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx
and the railroad between Fremont and Bay Ridge in Queens and Brooklyn but in both of the New York City cases, we did
not handle anywhere near the traffic that we handled through Weehawken and Hoboken.
In my time the worst part of working the River Line was the area south of CP-7 and I would suspect that is the same today.
Noel Weaver

Nowadays there seems to be alot of looting going on in Teaneck, especially when container trains have to sit in the hole because shared assets cant handle them.

Two pieces to read if these stories interest you

1. Jay Santucci's most recent blog post here at rr.net about being hustled and shot at by deviants in South Chicago around the Roseland neighborhood and Riverdale.
2. An old Trains Illustrated had a great story about C&NW police in Chicago's near west side, [global I] which is just as bad as the far south in Chicago.

Does anyone have any photos or movies of the National Docks line in Hoboken. I remeber when I was young and looking accross the Hudson River and watching blue Conrail engines go into the tunnel.

Thanks