Slightly OT, but not really. If you get up to NY, you have to walk the newly reopened RR bridge over the Hudson at Poughkeepsie. Amazing walk over the river, great views of the CSX west shore line, along with Amtrak and Metro-north trians on the east side. There are nice write ups on plaques telling the history of the bridge and the RR’s. All and all, very cool.
For more info: http://walkway.org/
Definitely not off topic! Forum Member Dave Williams posted some fantastic shots of, and from, the reopened bridge on another site. Pat and I both would like to go there, and will make it a stop on our next trip east, whenever that may be.
A great bridge on the New Haven’s Maybrook Line, built to last, built strong. Standard power when I was a kid was 2-10-2 Santa Fe type locomotives, replaced by Alco FA,FB,FB,FA Sets. Too bad we can’t see that again.
100 car freights pulling out of New Haven on the Shore Line, climbing two mountain ranges (with helper service at Hopewell Junction), crossing the Poughkeepsie Bridge to connect with the “Erie”, the “New York Ontario & Western”, the “Lehigh & New England”, and the “Lehigh & Hudson River” at Maybrook NY. The gateway to New England on J.P.Morgan’s New Haven Railroad.
A bridge that Penn Central had no use for and let fall into disrepair. Tear up the approach tracks so no one else could use it.
Yes, and then let it catch on fire.
If the rail connection still existed, would it be viable, or up for abandonment?
A beautiful renovated structure put back into use…Wonderful project success…
I agree with all the nice things people here are saying about this wonderful bridge. I’ve been traveling up & down the Hudson valley for about 40 years and this stalwart old railroad bridge never fails to grab & hold my attention.
But I think it would scare the living “whatever” out of me to cross it on foot or on a bike! I mean, it’s like about two miles high and sixty miles long and SO exposed to the winds, etc. I used to walk across the old Kinzua viaduct in NW Pennsylvania and it was no problem, just lots of fun. But in Poughkeepsie! Yikes!
Here’s to the brave souls who now can walk across the Hudson valley with, as the old hymn says, an “unmoistened foot.” Get your cameras ready and take your telephoto lenses!
As my father used to say:
“I’ve told you a MILLION times not to exaggerate!”
As for the camera, I believe a wide angle lens would be much more dramatic.
I have flown over (& under but don’t tell anybody) that bridge, but I don’t think I would walk it. lol.
The bridge doesn"t really connect to anything anymore. It connected the large Maybrook Yard complex to New England, nothing left there.
The fire wasn’t enough to close the bridge but it gave Penn Central the excuse it needed to do so. They wanted to run everything via Selkirk and the B&A line. By the time the bridge closed only one or two trains used it.
I have been there many times and it is a great structure, can’t wait to go across it…didn’t realize it was reopened.
Has anyone “out east” heard any news on the replacement of the New York State (“Thomas E. Dewey”) Thruway bridge at Tappan Zee (Tarrytown-Nyack, NY)? I heard that the 50+ year-old structure is in bad shape and plans were to include a Metro-North rail line on the new bridge, connecting the Hudson Line with the Port Jervis Line. I did find a web-site for info, but will have to search for it again. Just curious… Wonder if they will, again, build a bridge at the widest point of the Hudson. Makes political sense, no?
The “TZ” bridge is in wonderful shape after ongoing maintenance and upgrades. It’s now 7 lanes with a “Zipper Strip” down the center. The “Zipper Strip” center barrier is moved twice a day to give 4 lanes inbound (to New York City) in the morning and 4 lanes outbound in the afternoon. All Toll barriers accept “Speed Pass” so traffic does not have to stop to pay a Toll.
Yes, the widest point, a shallow sea (Zee) on the Hudson River. Most of the 3 1/2 mile bridge’s roadway runs out over shallow water before climbing to a bridge structure over the shipping channel, the former NYC Hudson Main Line, and meeting the high cliff hights at the Terrytown end. It’s I-87 (Thruway) and I-287 (New York Beltway) combined on one bridge, approaches and interchanges on both ends have been rebuilt and widened.
Over the years, there was talk of reactivating the Poughkeepsie High Bridge as a connection between Metro-North at Poughkeepsie and Jersey Transit’s Port Jervis line. Remember, the bridge was reinforced by The New Haven to carry some of the largest steam locomotives in the northeast hauling 100 car trains every hour. A light weight passenger train would not be a problem for the “Great Bridge”. Other plans may have shelved the idear, today Jersey Transit is digging new tunnels under the Hudson River to serve
Remember that the bridge was in freight service up to the fire. But PC and Conrail took all their New England traffic off the New Haven’s main and rerouted it through Selkirk. This included freight service over the Hell Gate Bridge and via the Bay Ridge - Greenville ex-PRR car floats, leaving the latter just with traffic to Long Island. Now CP and Pan Am do interchange with NY and Atlantic and the Cross Harbor, so some New England traffic again goes through Bay Ridge.
The Bridge could be an integral part of a Boston - Washington high speed scheme that would bypass New York and the slow operation on Metro North between New Haven and “Shell.”
I was with you until that part: [%-)] What route would you use on the western side of the Hudson River - from Highland to the southwest - to get back south and onto a main line to Washington, D.C. ?
Also, that’s in addition to the necessary circuitry to swing up to the northwest on the eastern side to get to Poughkeepsie, and the ‘non-starter’ of bypassing the largest potential market on the line - New York City and its close-in suburbs.
For what that would cost in capital expenditures and added operating costs - plus the loss of potential revenue - I would think that a lot of the slow operation on MN could be obviated by various improvements, even extra tracks, etc.
Prior to the building of the Hellgate Bridge and Hudson River Tunnels to the then new Penn Station, the New Haven did run passenger service over the Poughkeepsie Bridge. I don’t know the route a 100 years ago, but, at Maybrook the Lehigh & Hudson River connected you to Easton PA — Jersey Central, D.L.& W., Lehigh Valley. Maybrook also connected directly the Erie main line to Port Jervis (Jersey Transit?).
Sure, the NH did run via Poughkeepsie back then, but that because there was no feasible alternative. Now that there is, to go back to that route would be to either ignore or throw away - I can’t decide which term is more apt - that 100 years of progress and improvements.
The L&HR route then from Maybrook to Easton was a winding one down through hilly, scenic, and mostly rural northwestern New Jersey. There were only a few nearby traffic sources, and that hasn’t changed much since then - those have mostly dried up and disappeared.
Notably here, none of those routes or connections then or now would do much to get passengers to/from Washington, D.C. with any directness or speed. The best 3 routes then would have been either west a little bit to Bethlehem, PA and then south on the Reading to Philadelphia, or west all the way to Harrisburg, PA and then south on either the PRR’s ‘Port Road’/ Columbia & Port Deposit Line to Perryville, MD, or it’s Northern Central to Baltimore. But they’d all still be roundabout and slow at best, and the first has been abandoned for almost 30 years now, the 3rd isn’t much better, and the 2nd was extensive single track and is freight-only now. So I’d still prefer and opt for improving a more direct route through the NYC area.
Keep in mind, 100 years ago J.P. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad was often called “The Consolidated”. Morgan also controlled the Lehigh & N.E, the N.Y.O. & W., and the READING as well as having the New Haven’s Board of Directors on the Boston & Maine. J.P. Morgan died in 1913, then things started to come apart.
Passenger service into New York State and New Jersey had to find a way, and the Poughkeepsie Bridge was (is) the most southerly (railroad) crossing of the Hudson River. You could end up digging Tunnels as the PRR did, or run all the way to Albany to cross, Poughkeepsie still looked good to the “Consolidated” at that time.
1). Yes, there are plans underway to build or rebuild a bridge along the line of the Tappen Zee. More lanes are needed, the bridge is old; there is also nested in those plans putting rail on the bridge as well, but it is not firm.
2). The PC did use the tie fire as an excuse to close the bridge and deprive the EL, LV, CNJ, Reading, et al. of an interchange to New England at Maybrook. The EL fought the idea and for a while there was a PC train over the EL’s Utica to Binghamton branch to effect the Maybrook interchange at Binghamton. Another casualty was, of course, the Lehigh and Hudson River which ferried traffic from the connections at Phillipsburg, NJ and Allentown, PA.
The intercity passenger service talked about above was a short lived PRR-NH train called The Federal or Federal Express from Washington, DC to Boston which eliminated the need to either ferry the cars through New York Harbor, or otherwise have passenger trek between Exchange Place, Jersey City to Grand Central to affect a connection. The DL&W, connecting with the L&HR at Andover Jct, NJ also added cars to the train with a hop up from Hoboken. I don’t believe the service saw 5 years before the PRR had tunneled under the Hudson.
Although the Alphabet Route and the EL,and LV utilized the Maybrook Gateway, the last bigl hurrah for the bridge was the JET trailer train which left Boston in mid afternoon on the NH to Cedar Hill to Maybrook where the L&HR took hold and delivered the train to the PRR at Hudson Yard in Phillipsburg. PRR flew the train to Trenton to be added to a westbound pig for as quick a Chicago delivery as possible. This was a service designed to compete with the Boston and Albany-NYC Boston to Chicago direct line trains and it did succeed.
I’m sure that via Poughkeepsie did look good 100 years ago. But as John Kneiling often said, ‘‘Back then they did what they could, not what they would have wanted, or what would have been the best.’’ And ‘‘That was then, this is now’’ - but we now have the benefit of a ‘better’ solution, via the NYC tunnels. So in the early 21st century, I’m just not seeing any advantages in going back to the 1880’s or early 1900’s route, as a solution to the Metro-North congestion problem along the Connecticut ‘Shore Line’ region.
Freight wise, the route could still be a viable way around NYC which may become important if there is an increase in container loading and unloading in the New York Harbor area. Also, we’ve not mentoned Stewart Air Port near Newburg. A former Air Force base it is expexcted to become a major passenger terminal for NYC metro, thus the interest in rail passenger services being provide across the Hudson as well as south into NJ.
From the Poughkeepsie Bridge’s ‘‘Walkway’’ website - trains started crossing it in 1889: http://walkway.org/ [emphasis added - PDN]
New York Times Editorial
October 5, 2009
The View From 1889
The Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge . . . is a marvel of Industrial Revolution engineering. It fills the sky over the Hudson River, a muscular lattice of trusses and struts on giant footings, a survivor from a long-gone era before bridge mediocrities like the Tappan Zee.
[(-D]