Apparently the chart shows the grade on the passenger mains, which climb to the elevated Hackensack River bridge.
You really need to do a bit of basic historical research and get some of these preconceived notions out of your head.
Yards are built wherever it is convenient, usually based on land and water availability. Flat or gently bowled terrain is ideal, but it is not absolutely required. The idea of yards being built as refuges for runaway trains to slow down is absurd in North America as it would imply that normal train operations are being conducted without sufficient braking power. If your local railroad is doing that then they really need to rethink their operating practices and install a proper braking system on their equipment.
Yards have shop or RIP tracks (repair in place) for defective cars, but they are few in number and generally are a very small part of the yard as a whole.
Runaway tracks (like runaway truck ramps) have only ever been built at a small number of very steep grades over here, Saluda (5%) and CP’s original Big Hill (4.5%) are the only ones I can think of offhand.
Passenger trains do just fine on 1%. Heavy freight trains do not.
Give enough wind in the right direction, and a cut of cars without any brakes appliedf can roll uphill on a mild grade.
Thank you very much for this post. According to the diagram, the station has a grade of -0.24%, and possibly also what appears to be written as +0.10%. So, I scoured the Internet and found this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Rainy_Day_at_Newark_Penn_Station.jpg. The vertical curve clearly starts at the east end of the main section of the platform, where it meets the the now-closed-off platform extension, so the station is clearly a constant -0.24% grade. Also, the grade beyond the station is clearly much greater than +0.1%, so, maybe the text in the unclear scanned photo originally said +01.0%.
So surprising, because BART has a design limit of a 1% grade maximum at their stations, and BART vehicles are way higher performance than mainline vehicles because they are lightweight, aluminum metro EMUs rather than heavy, steel loco-hauled double-decker carriages.
So steep! It is surprising because it is located in dead-level terrain because it is on an alluvial plain, more specifically, a delta. It would be the perfect place to make the rail yard perfectly level, at a grade of 0.000% (all significant figures), or at least Indian Railways’ preferrable maximum of 1:1200 ≈ 0.083%, but, nope, they decided to mess things up as bad as they can and build it at the standard maximum ruling grade of exactly 1%.
I think you missed the point that I was indeed misreading the chart. The grade profile provided only indicated the passenger-main gradient, which as he indicated starts rising to the elevated Hackensack River bridge at that location…
When you consider the sources of those track chart profiles, many are giving you data from over 100 years ago and are hardly relative (and did not reflect top or bottom of rail, vertical curves or datum) … Far too many people are reading things into them that do not reflect reality (like yard grades, etc), relativity of a schematic at 1"=3000’ or greater has to be taken with a grain of salt.
(today’s version of this is many people’s stupid blind faith in handheld GPS units where the GIS input is already questionable as it was somebody’s guess to start with)… GIS is often an acronym for Get It Surveyed or Garbage In - Standard!