Westchester Yard - The Bronx

Recently I have come across some information on the New Haven’s Westchester Yard. At the beginning of the last century, the yard had approximately 22 miles of track, three transfer platforms of 1,200 feet in length, and an office with various yard facilities. In 1920 the yard handled 80% of the classification for eastbound freights while Oak Point handled only 20%. Eventually the yard would shrink substantially in size and perform a minor function. Did the operations of the New York Connecting Railroad at Bay Ridge help contribute to yard’s disuse? I have to confess, I haven’t seen a location of the yard on some of the NH maps that I have come across in the past. I have attached a rare photo of the yard.

I believe Westchester Yard was cut back and closed down after big improvements were made to Cedar Hill in the mid 20's.
Midway Yard east of Groton was downsized around that time too and that was also a big facility. By my time in the early 60's
there was only work at Westchester Yard for local customers there.
Noel Weaver

Thanks Noel for the information. Although it is difficult so to see in the posted photo, the mainline is on the left side which meant that the yard was most likely on the southeast side of the line. I have not been able to find a location for it, but was it East of West Farms?

Westchester Yard was way east of West Farms. In fact it wasn't too far west of Pelham Bay.
Noel Weaver

Westchester Yard was located between Eastchester Road and Bronx & Pelham Parkway. Its east end was controlled by S.S. 12, a wooden structure with a mechanical interlocking machine (probably Johnson or US&S). The location can be seen here: http://tile24.mqcdn.com/map/Scale18000/8/960/5/767.gif

Can't say when, but by 1936 it was no longer in use. By that time, not only had two tracks been removed from the Harlem River Branch between West Farms Junction (formerly S.S. 8, out of service in 1931) and S.S. 22, New Rochelle Junction, but Oak Point Yard had been fully expanded via land fill to handle all the traffic (which was slowly diminishing due to the Depression). At one time it was a major LCL transfer point.

Thanks all in for the information on the Westchester Yard. Reviewing the satellite picture of the yard’s former location, I came across what appears to be some remaining platforms of a station situated on the mainline and east of the yard. Which station was this? It’s amazing that the platforms are still intact more than 75 years after the termination of local passenger service. Each platform scales to about 750 feet in length (see photo). Since the grade of the mainline increases in elevation to cross Eastchester Road, was the spur to the Westchester Yard located further east by this station? The bridge shown spanning the mainline in the attached photo is for the Bronx and Pelham Parkways.

Sorry, but what you're looking at are not platforms. They may be retaining walls, but they're not platforms. The yard entrance was just to the west of where Bronx & Pelham Parkway crossed over the New Haven:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.85577 ... &t=h&hl=en

By the way, the current occupant of the large factory building on the yard site, Old London Foods (they make Melba toast), is closing their plant and moving out of state. Another 100+ jobs gone; the usual refrain nowadays. "Inefficient" layout is the official reason. The story was in last week's NY Times. Don't know if they ever had rail service (inbound flour?).

Are you sure? I don’t think those are retaining walls. The uniform shadowing appears to show raised flat surfaces, and even possibly sheds. If these were retaining walls, there would most likely be a variance in shadow width along the length of each structure showing the change in grade or wall elevations, with minimal shadowing a the tail ends. The top surface of each structure scales to about seven feet wide which is not typical for retaining walls. I think the grade of the roadbed for the mainline is higher than the adjoining land. If these structures were not used for a station, I don’t know what purpose they served.

As for job loss in the area, this is nothing new. Unfortunately this has also become a national trend with China, India and Mexico being the beneficiaries.

chnhrr wrote:Are you sure? I don’t think those are retaining walls. The uniform shadowing appears to show raised flat surfaces, and even possibly sheds. If these were retaining walls, there would most likely be a variance in shadow width along the length of each structure showing the change in grade or wall elevations, with minimal shadowing a the tail ends. The top surface of each structure scales to about seven feet wide which is not typical for retaining walls. I think the grade of the roadbed for the mainline is higher than the adjoining land. If these structures were not used for a station, I don’t know what purpose they served.

As for job loss in the area, this is nothing new. Unfortunately this has also become a national trend with China, India and Mexico being the beneficiaries.

They are retaining walls, there were no platforms for track 6, freight only track from Pelham Bay (SS-14 to Fremont) and
the LIRR to Bay Ridge.
Old London was not in Westchester Yard to my knowledge but was west of that point and a bit east of Van Nest. Hope my
memory did not fail me on this one and I don't think it did.
Noel Weaver

Yes you guys are right. They are retaining walls. I took a look at a satellite view from another website and have come to that conclusion. I guess I won’t get a job with the Department of Defense in aerial reconnaissance.

Did any of the former stations on the Harlem River Branch have high level platforms? I know the NYW&B used high levels on the White Plains and Port Chester lines, but since these were NYNH&H buildings I'd always assumed they were low level.

A couple of the station buildings themselves still exist, either as ruins or in commercial use, but I've never noticed a trace of a platform when I've ridden that line on the way to/from Boston.

Apart from Harlem River, all the New Haven platforms on the Harlem River Branch were low-level. Harlem River had both, depending on the year.

I grew up in the area, and still frequent the location. The former site of Westchester Yard is eaily visable from the Weiler Hosptial of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (built in th early 1950s) west of the former NH Harlem River branch, now Amtrak's NEC. The yard was bounded on the north by Pelham Parkway, the eastern boundry would be approximately where the Hutchinson River Parkway runs. The southern boundry was Waters Place, dividing it from the New York Subway's Westchester Yard.

The last physical remnants of the yard were about two or three of the steel catenary support towers in what had become the parking lot for a Fuel Oil distributor on Waters Place, near the corner of Eastchester road. They lasted until about 2003-2004 when the property was sold and ands a new Pathmark Supermarket was built on the site.

I recall watching Penn Central RS3's shuffling cars in/out of the siding to the Old London plant (also the home of Dipsey Doodles, not just Melba toast), as late as 1974, which still stands adjacent to the NEC tracks. I beleive that was the last of any freight activity there.

It seems the Westchester yard was sold off piecemeal. Looking at the photograph in the first posting on this thread, if you can imagine you are looking northward at the yard while standing on Waters Place, the land on the right hand side of the photo became the Bronx Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s. while the the land to the left was split into three distinct pieces; The southermost section of the former yard (on Waters Place) became the storage and parking lot for a Fuel Oil Distributor (and now the site of a Pathmark supermarket). Above that (north along the NEC tracks) was buikt Calvary Hospice in the early 1980s. And north of the hospice stands the Old London plant. My guess is that coal and fuel were delivered to the fuel oil distributor via some remaining trackage in to the 1970s as well.

Folks, the retaining walls/platforms/both/neither that the previous discussion was about are none of the above. They are leftover piers constructed for an intended widening of that section of Pelham Parkway.. The widening was never done, so there the piers sit