by lirr42
In light of the recent CSX derailment of trash cars that very well could have come from Long Island, I wrote up a piece detailing the long and out of the way route that freight trains like the one that derailed have to take to get off Long Island and onto the other side of the Hudson. You can read it here: How Long Island Gets Rid of Its Trash.
lirr42 for The LIRR Today wrote:... Lots of time the toughest part about this trash removal process is getting the actual garbage off the island. More often then not companies load their trash onto a fleet of trucks and send it off the island by road. However, the amount of bridges off this island is limited and the fleets of trucks wanting to use those bridges is ever growing, so there is frequently lots of money wasted on gas and tolls and all like that.
However, there is one other option, a option that is growing more and more popular by the month. These days more and more companies are looking to ship their trash out by rail.
New York & Atlantic Railway, the LIRR's semi-separate freight operator, has a ever growing business in the trash exportation industry. NY&AR rounds up freight cars worth of trash from all different points on Long Island and eventually hands those cars over to CSX for transportation off the island and to their final resting place. It was a little while after that handoff to CSX that that aforementioned derailment took place.
However, the route that a freight car full of trash has to take to get to its final destination is considerably longer than if it were simply trucked across a bridge...
