In NYC days, there was another interlocking at Mt. St. Vincent which incorporated crossovers to main tracks Tks. 5 & 6 so that freight traffic could merge or diverge there and run straight rail via the bridge.
shlustig wrote:In NYC days, there was another interlocking at Mt. St. Vincent which incorporated crossovers to main tracks Tks. 5 & 6 so that freight traffic could merge or diverge there and run straight rail via the bridge.That might be necessary to bring back in some form or another. Constructing a flyover junction in such a tight space is going to be very difficult. There's little to no lateral room to start the flyover incline north of the bridge and sweep overhead with the river and the abutting private property pinning the ROW in to its footprint. And putting the incline further south before the wye requires nuking the bridge for a high span, which is self-defeating on cost. The way to do this may be to do an improved set of universal crossovers right at the junction, and bring back Track 5 to do a second set up by the old Mt. St. Vincent location so there's 2 options to merge/diverge around train meets. Not as elegant as a perfect grade-separated flyover, but this is a high-priority bottleneck that really can't wait for that kind of extremely large funding commitment. Spreading it out and offering up some crossover redundancy around meets may be a fully effective solution that can get done a lot quicker and with less disruption. Save the talk of flyovers for when this is a full NY State HSR line and get something meaningful done here this decade that provides big relief at current traffic levels and effectively provisions for future MNRR-Penn service.
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