Amtrak Gateway Tunnels

Believe the PRR coal train test put a period on freight thru the North(Hudson) River tubes.
For now the Port Authorty has put their $$$$ on Car Floats across the Bay for freight.

At any time as now Pres.Trump have had any dealings with the Port Authorty that went sour?
Might explain his "change of plans" due to the PA is the Lead on Gateway when costruction starts.

I would think that even a container-on-flatcar (low height and weight and avoiding third rail clearance problems of well cars) would be a more efficient operation than a cross harbor ferry system. A couple of new or rebuilt P32AC-DM or ALP-45DP "dual-mode" locomotives and you're in business. No new freight tunnel, no problem using the existing Amtrak tunnels or Gateway.

Let's face it, any rail freight traffic through New York City isn't going to be any long heavy 286,000 lb cars or tall double-stack type stuff. A short single-stack container train shuttling between New Jersey and Queens could do wonders and could be running within a year.

Operating with an engine on both ends (or even a cab-car of some sort) it maybe could reverse direction at Oak Island Junction in New Jersey and again near Sunnyside and head down to the planned new Intermodal terminal in the Newtown Creek area or head over to Fresh Pond. Short fast shuttles running back and forth overnight when the traffic is low.

Amtrak controls the North(Hudson) River tubes,and shares the East River Tubes with LIRR(MTA),believe both would rather not deal
with freight moves under the current conditions in both tunnels due to Sandy's leftover damage/"meatball fixes" done.
The Roadrailer would have been ideal,but NS has retired their entire fleet not to long ago (Fleet aged out for interchange),
and a whole nest of NIMBY's would fight any kind of large intermodal yard being created.
There were a whole lot of "greased palms" just to allow the Brookhaven Transload yard to exisit.
The Pinelawn wye,now gone,would have been ideal area for an intermodal yard.

I have wondered if Amtrak could "rent" out the tunnels overnight to freight railroads, but I suspect right now, with just 2 North River tunnels and the 4 East River, they don't want to risk further damage.

Really, freight, if it is to get to LI and New England short of going to Selkirk is going to need its own tunnel.

Backshophoss wrote:
The Roadrailer would have been ideal,but NS has retired their entire fleet not to long ago (Fleet aged out for interchange),
and a whole nest of NIMBY's would fight any kind of large intermodal yard being created.

I remember something about the the Roadrailer couldn't be used because the tires would hit the third rail.

The planned Intermodal yard near Newtown Creek has had some NIMBY opposition but if you check it out the area is an uninhabited industrial wasteland. You really wonder where the complainers are even coming from.

The Roadrailer Tadem had a narrower wheelbase then a regular trailer tadem,you could have a problem if the tadem did not
tuck up under the floor of the Roadrailer body in rail mode.

if the whole point is to move freight away from NYC and the tunnels, Could they build a bridge near New London cheaper then any alternative to anything near NYC. I picked New London do to there already being a freight terminal there, there could be other locations that would work better such as New Haven. this would get freight traffic away from the tunnels and trucking away from NYC.This also would have little NIMBY opposition. this would be a very long bridge and costly but I would think a bridge would be cheaper then a tunnel but I have zero experience with cost of either. There also would be a need to allow shipping through such as a draw bridge or a section that rises higher to allow shipping traffic. or there could be a section similar to the auto road going through the Chesapeake bay bridge - tunnel.

bostontrainguy wrote:I would think that even a container-on-flatcar (low height and weight and avoiding third rail clearance problems of well cars) would be a more efficient operation than a cross harbor ferry system. A couple of new or rebuilt P32AC-DM or ALP-45DP "dual-mode" locomotives and you're in business. No new freight tunnel, no problem using the existing Amtrak tunnels or Gateway.

Let's face it, any rail freight traffic through New York City isn't going to be any long heavy 286,000 lb cars or tall double-stack type stuff. A short single-stack container train shuttling between New Jersey and Queens could do wonders and could be running within a year.

Operating with an engine on both ends (or even a cab-car of some sort) it maybe could reverse direction at Oak Island Junction in New Jersey and again near Sunnyside and head down to the planned new Intermodal terminal in the Newtown Creek area or head over to Fresh Pond. Short fast shuttles running back and forth overnight when the traffic is low.

But where's this traffic going to go once it hits Brooklyn? There's really just not a lot of demand on LI for the kind of stuff RRs like to move. Going farther out onto LI brings its own set of headaches - the current freight operator's ability to not screw up the commutes of thousands is pretty limited, and a large increase in traffic means more chances for things to go wrong. The last thing LI needs is irregular influxes of thousands of drivers on the LIE...

The LIRR would best serve the area operating the way other RRs with its conditions operate. Realistically, that means trying to duplicate the operational styles of one of the JRs - lots of trains, tightly scheduled, to make use of limited resources to move as many folks as possible. Look at the fight that's going on just to do a third track (bold prediction - it won't happen) on the main.

As far as Gateway? Just build the damn thing already. This country needs to learn how to design/build things cheaper and a LOT faster. Decades of planning to build a stupid tunnel is crazy.

You don't need a tunnel. Hudson Line freight capacity has already been upgraded considerably in the 18 years since the Oak Point Link opened, and it hasn't compelled any sort of explosion in freight loads. They've had complete 286K loading Selkirk-Harlem since Day 1 of the OPL, and 19'6" autorack/mixed-cube clearance Selkirk to Tarrytown since shortly before the GM plant in Tarrytown closed. NYSDOT has been dragging its feet funding the second-phase clearance improvements project that closes the Tarrytown-Morris Heights clearance gap to the Oak Point Link and adds new lengths of passing tracks around Spuyten Duyvil station to keep freight separated on approach to the tight curve. The reason they haven't hurried up and funded such a relatively modest package of remainders is that demand hasn't compelled them to pull it off the backburner, so it remains a low-priority item they'll get to when the spirit moves them.

About the only thing you can't do now or upon completion of that remainders project with the Hudson is run high-and-wide Plate F's and greater cars south of the division post at Poughkeepsie freight yard at full speed through the MNRR full-high platforms that lack passing tracks: New Hamburg, Cold Spring, Garrison, Peekskill in diesel territory + Ossining (twin-island touching all 4 tracks) and Spuyten Duyvil (for now, until the Tarrytown-south package adds a passer) in electric territory. Since all the affected platforms are fully tangent that doesn't restrict high-and-wides at all but merely forces CSX to slow to a crawl through them to limit lateral movement causing platform strikes, like P&W does when it drags autoracks every day through the T.F. Green commuter platform on the NEC in Rhode Island. Thru freights only run at night so that's not a problem, and won't be a problem until business increases enough that CSX has to add enough extra overnight trains to the schedule to start fretting about the time crunch. If we ever reach a point where that's a factor, pure-on passenger capacity will have already compelled NYSDOT to enact some of the tri-tracking recs for the HSR/Empire Service expansion study and all 4 of those 2-track diesel platforms will have been rebuilt with center passers...leaving just a circumstantial outlier like Ossining to rationalize for high-and-wide schedules.



It's the same perception-vs.-reality with the so-called "Selkirk hurdle" that we've been dealing with for 4 decades. Public planners see it as a big deal that freight has to route around each side of the Hudson. The Class I's do not. The customers, for the most part, do not. Even without all that 'manifest destiny' stuff of bringing containers deep onto Long Island if there were a general upswell of regional freight demand the Hudson Line would already be seeing its carloads increase year by year in the post-OPL era. That hasn't been the case. The trash train still dominates the proceedings with its own dedicated round trip. I think there's still only one guaranteed nightly Selkirk-Harlem round-trip of manifest freight on the schedule covering all other thru traffic, and that's it for trans-corridor traffic except for the nights they have to tack on a second run-as-directed for mop-up. That's the most they've been able to muster after all the investment in Hunts Point Market, clearance improvements to NY&A interchange @ Fresh Pond, LI transloading, and so on: one, not two, guaranteed manifest round-trips every night. The rest of the CSX schedule is just the Croton locals that putter around light during business hours to the fast-dwindling number of on-line Hudson customers.

If they can't even stoke demand for a second fully scheduled nightly manifest train on the Hudson that taps even a modicum of those capacity enhancements, or get calls for NYSDOT to hurry up and finish the Tarrytown-Morris Heights improvements package...where are the visible signs that the "hurdle" is becoming more of a hurdle? We're not really seeing a 'rising tide lifts all boats' effect from the newfound east-of-Hudson capacity. Yes, all those LI-centric cross-harbor freight studies are a whole different empire-building scheme encompassing a whole lot more than a drop-in replacement for the Selkirk hurdle. But before we start asking ourselves about whether passenger infrastructure like Gateway should be significantly redesigned for freight loads and clearances, focus on how well the passenger infrastructure that's already been redesigned for that purpose is being utilized. East-of-Hudson freight is barely utilizing the upgraded Hudson & OPL infrastructure to the night shift's available capacity. It's growing incrementally, not exponentially...with a curve not yet steep enough to compel the state to finish up that rather middling-cost package of Tarrytown-Morris Heights clearance remainders. The renewed car floats are doing pretty well, but not exactly bursting at the seams compelling more, more, more from whence they came. Staten Island is getting leveraged more for outbound trash, sidestepping east-of-Hudson entirely to address perhaps the biggest slice of carload growth.

Shouldn't we be treating this outlook systemically and seeing a much faster-accelerating growth curve on all the minty-new freight upgrades informing how quickly additional improvements and additional lanes are going to be needed? Hand-wringing about Gateway needing to take on freight is a complete waste of engineering time and resources when we can't throw enough ideas at the wall to fill out a regular Hudson night shift in 2 decades' time.

Greg Moore wrote:I have wondered if Amtrak could "rent" out the tunnels overnight to freight railroads, but I suspect right now, with just 2 North River tunnels and the 4 East River, they don't want to risk further damage.

I believe that both the Shinkansen in Japan and the DB (on its high-speed lines) originally contemplated handling freight in the midnight hours and found that they need that time for maintenance; I'm sure the same would be the case here.

We can agree that if they want Class I Freight go through NYC faster, then they need to build a bridge way north of the Hudson River into territory where diesel engines can run through. Tunnelling won't work due to current law. It's a separate project no matter what, out of scope for the Gateway Tunnels.

Better yet...combine forces with that underwhelming Hudson Line-to-Stewart Airport proposal and plunk an Arthur Kill-style single-track lift bridge between spanning the Beacon Line @ Dutchess Jct. via the tip of Denning Point with the Newburgh Industrial Track on the other side. Which would've been one of the candidate sites for that Hudson-Stewart Alternative's bridge had the study been advanced since it's a reasonably narrow-enough point in the river, allows for a bridge that starts 20+ ft. in the air before rising to a lift span, and has extant E-W lines + junctions present-and-past to hook up to. And it's north of PANYNJ territorial reach so the MTA/NYSDOT wouldn't have to share control with Port Authority's cesspit of construction corruption.

Not that the Stewart connector was anything worth pursuing. Airport connectors are way overrated in general, and demand to Stewart is dodgy even from the far easier Port Jervis side. But it would goose utilization of the bridge and make the Stewart deal look a lot less craptacular in the process to combine forces and make that the Selkirk de-hurdler. 50 miles of Hudson co-mingling where passenger track expansion takes care of the capacity needs and accommodates a robust overnight schedule and select off-peak day slots, while thru freight disappears forever Beacon-Albany leaving only the tiny Troy-Rensselaer and Stuyvesant-Hudson locals (and a lot less $$$ required for electrification clearances on that 80+ miles if NYSHSR ever gets unstuck).

In the end it'll probably cost one-eighth or less that of the cross-harbor freight tunnel and all the ultra-invasive clearance work on the southern three-quarters of the Bay Ridge Branch, while probably serving the 50-year freight needs of the region just as well. And also cost a lot less than re-engineering Gateway for heights and weights that can only accommodate a much more limited and ops ham-fisted after-hours freight schedule that runs afoul of tunnel MoW hours.

It's not like the studies have exactly proven the math on where all this massive double-stack traffic through the cross-harbor tunnel is supposed to go once it touches down in Brooklyn, given lack of yard space for transloading all those supposed carloads. In the end a "good enough" Hudson probably serves all the transloads they can practically build vs. the fantasy ones they can't build, and they'll have to seek efficiencies with *some* judicious sharing of up-to-snuff passenger infrastructure (as opposed to Penn + Gateway which is far, far, far from up-to-snuff). Seeking a bridge bailout across the Hudson within a reasonably taut 90-minute freight trip from the city instead of right at ground zero is probably the only compromise they realistically have to shoot for if they really want to do this, and want to right-size it for actual achievable carloads. And that's only if public planners really want to shoot for it. The as-is "hurdle" still isn't much of a hurdle when the Hudson Line is barely tapping its capacity for manifest freight.

Hudson line to Stewart airport? I've never heard of that proposal. Is there any information on what the plan would be? I haven't found anything on that

The Stewart Airport "branch" is a WOH project,NOT part of the Hudson line.
Intermodal with spine cars is possible,but there's no plan to build an intermodal yard anywhere on the island.
Brookhaven is a transload yard,the last known possible place was the wye at Pinelawn,that's gone now.
As is any routing over the now abandoned Montauk Cutoff.

DanD3815 wrote:Hudson line to Stewart airport? I've never heard of that proposal. Is there any information on what the plan would be? I haven't found anything on that

It was a study option rejected in the Level 1 screening results of the MNRR West-of-Hudson Transit Access Study: http://web.mta.info/mta/planning/whrtas ... eening.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. That option didn't make the cut for Level 2 screening, and was dropped from further consideration because of cost. The only things they're considering now are direct rail spur off the Port Jervis Line, and various connecting buses. Pretty much all of the study has ground to a halt with no action in >5 years because demand for Stewart is so dodgy.

All that was sketched out about the Hudson Alts. was that there would be *a* new bridge near Beacon. They didn't so much as hazard a guess where, so they just highlighted I-84 on a map and said "alignment TBD". Since it never qualified for further study, no additional details were ever refined.


I bring it up only because that was a real, documented proposal...not because it was a good one by any means. Every direct rail alt., including the Port Jerv ones, are total losers on cost-benefit. The study can't even come up with a clear bus route that consolidates soft demand well enough. The mere study existence of a direct Hudson Line alt., however, would've been less of a poop sandwich if Stewart connectivity had any Selkirk de-hurdling freight coattails fluffing its flagging fortunes. The all-freight PANYNJ tunnel has yet to show where the EoH demand is for such overkill freight capacity through the city, and at the pornographic rate the Port Authority loses control of construction costs it's liable to cost twice as much as the already obscene estimates. As per the on-topic tie-in to Gateway (seriously...it's in there! ), you can't just stick after-hours freight in the passenger tunnel and declare "Achievement: resources pooled!" The whole prelim engineering for Gateway would have to be thrown in the trash and begun anew to re-anchor a tunnel in soft river silt that can handle the very different weight dynamics of several-dozen car trains full of 286K carloads, with vertical clearances anywhere from 2.5 ft. (Plate F) to 6 ft. (double-stack) taller. That could for-real double the cost and timeline for the Gateway tunnel. It's the reason why a near-century of cross-harbor freight tunnel studies have never considered the NEC alignment and more multipurpose tubes; wrong geology to be attempting anything but a lightweight passenger-only crossing.

Given the general cost-horribleness of all of ^those^ tunnel options, a Selkirk de-hurdler could do a lot worse than dusting off the Hudson-Stewart poop sandwich and building a new multipurpose bridge in Dutchess Co. for ⅛ the price of any freight-rated intracity tunnel bore. The Lower Hudson/Oak Point infrastructure is plenty overbuilt for tippy-top real-world EoH freight volumes and is a short enough direct trip to move every manifest freight they'd need to pack on the night shift and select off-peak slots. I only posit that option as a least-worst alternative because I think this thread severely underestimates the cost of all the engineering changes required to give Gateway any sort of nebulous flexibility for slipping a freight train through. Current design is not geologically compatible at all, so there are no efficiencies gained by looking at Gateway as some sort of partial solve.


Therefore, if you have to do something just for doing something's sake, the Stewart rehash is a less obscenely wasteful pooling of capital resources that solves the (real...not overinflated) 50-year demand considerations for NYC freight. But make no mistake...it's still a poop sandwich by most empirical measures, even if those loads end up on the high end and even if Stewart passenger demand magically materializes from somewhere. We've yet to demonstrate that there is a for-real Selkirk Hurdle that's enough of a freight mobility threat to compel building ANY sort of trans-Hudson megaproject. They're all poop-sandwich money pits until the revenue case gets clearer. Some are just worse money pits than others. Right now, the money pits rank like:

PANYNJ tunnel $$$$³ > re-engineered "Greightway" tunnel $$$ > Dutchess Co. "Stew-bridge" $$ > plain-old Hudson Line/Oak Point capacity & clearance management.