You’re not the first. The Reading Railroad originally proposed electrification of the line from West Trenton to Bound Brook, linking with an electrification to be done by the Central Railroad of New Jersey(Jersey Central), then a Reading subsidiary, of its main line out of Jersey City. (They may have also proposed to electrify their connection to the New York and Long Branch, though it probably would have been a quasi-isolated electrification…it would have met the PRR at South Amboy, but probably would have had no connection with a Jersey Central main line electrification.) The Reading’s proposals were based on the PRR’s system in the Philadelphia area, and since the Jersey Central was a Reading subsidiary, it would have followed Reading practice, and to an extant, PRR practice. Sorry to hijack this thread, but had there been an electrified alternate to the NEC, service issues could have been different in the days between May 12 and May 18.
The overbuilt NYW&B should have never been.
If it had been built with more reasonable costs, double, not four track, to the same standards as the C&AE and North Shore, and at Willis Avenue station had a through connection and operated through to Park Row on the 2nd Avenue elevated, which had both the capacity and the structure to support such additional service and heavier cars, both it and the 2nd Avenue elevated would have lasted longer. But in the end, it still would not have lasted much past the end of WWII. The slower trip as compared with the Harlem Div. and the New Haven would have been compensated by a one-seat ride to the Financial District and better distribution to multiple Manhattan destinations, like the North Shore and C&AE provided commuters to Chicago.
The impression I got from the “Railfan and Railroad” article I mentioned earlier in the thread was that the NYW&B was really ahead of it’s time. Westchester County didn’t develop as fast as the NYW&B’s backers thought it would, then came the whammy of the Great Depression, so the 'road just couldn’t survive. Those that did ride it were fanatical about it.
Would it make sense to rebuild it today? Well, if the right of way still exists, and if the patronage is there, then certainly.
Same old story though, it come down to money, and lots of it!
The right of way indeed exists, but some has landfill in it; I have trouble, however, believing clearing landfill would cost anywhere near as much as blasting. And a lot of those factories on Fulton may simply have very large basements-the retaining wall on Sanford looks like it replaced a bridge which was probably scrapped…
The crossing at 3rd and Harford is still intact.
Whether or not it makes sense to repossess some factories in the zone and move them I think is the real question. I would say that a new stop at Sanford (Sixth) would go a long way to helping the conditions of poverty in the area and unemployment, and open lands in Mount Vernon to much higher density commercial-not too far away (but too far to serve the line) are large commercial complexes near the Pelham border. Little reason these couldn’t be built near a reopened line to get Bronx Business. This means…jobs.
I think, however, doing something like this requires two things:
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Creativity
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Political will-there are a lot of people who are against making Westchester “Suburbs” more dense. But this is inevitable if NYC continues to grow and Westchester doesn’t want to suffer a dramatic brain drain. It to me is kind of a no-brainer: Improve access to jobs, create temporary construction jobs, and be able to support a higher population density in order to spread the tax base and lower taxes…but, some people cherish a smaller community-even though young middle class people generally won’t touch Westchester with a ten foot poll because they simply can’t afford it.You can have suburbia or lower taxes. Not both. Revising our transit infrastructure in Westchester would make this question existential.
Three photos in the area of the East 180th Street Hq. of the NYW&B. The picture of NYW&B in its years of operation and the celebration of the start of throuugh Lexington Avenue subway service to Dyre Avenue were sent me by Nathan Gersten. The ex-NYW&B RoW between E. 180 and slightly north of Dyre Avernue was restored to service by the Transit Authority during WWII with two-car ex-elevated gate-cars as E-180 - Dyre Avenue shuttles, and I photographed one in December 1947 through the window of a Lexington Avenue train headed to 241xt Street and White Plains Road:
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Useless Kalmbach IT duplicate #1
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Useless Kalmbach IT duplicate #2.
Glad to see this necro thread, and much of the treasure it contains, revived again.
The Morgan version of the NYW&B reflects a great number of assumptions peculiar to the time money was thrown at it. Very few if any of those are still applicable enough to ‘rebuild’ it; in fact the only real ‘logical’ thing would be to build on the Dyre Avenue ‘experience’ and try to convert to subway-compatible 3rd rail with subway equipment clearances to give an actual one-seat ride, albeit hella slow by any modern alternative standard.
The crayonista thing would be to see where logical extension to unserved areas of Westchester are. I doubt there are many that would get adequate service for the capital cost involved. On the other hand if a single track were to eventuate across the Tappan ZEE bridge replacement, relatively small subway-type cars would be just as much an ‘answer’ as IND cars would have been – and still could be – on the Martha Washington Bridge.
The West Trenton line would be reconnected to the Raritan line at Bridgewater anyway. Many Raritan trains have dual-mode power to use Manhattan Direct, so incremental electrification could be done on any scale… or perhaps not at all. The ex-Reading electrification south was to PRR-compatible standards so the ALP45-DPs could easily run through “end to end” if you could stand to ride commuter cars that long (all you’d need is an agreement with SEPTA comparable to what NJT has with Metro-North for Graham Line service to Port Jervis).
The ‘second spine’ line needs to run places the current NEC doesn’t, with the limited stops a true 220mph railroad requires. I think the Chinese have built out the necessary infrastructure to build a true HSR line on the White Train routing without colossal earthmoving and rock blasting of all those ridges, with a great part of the line hundreds of feet up on self-launched viaducts. I am also tempte
A lot of NYWB was constructed in antispation of a real estate boom much in the way Brightline is being built today. Somehow with timing it did not work out as expected in the 1940s as needed however it was high tech for it’s time like Brightline is today
The real-estate boom along the Bronx portion of the line did come after subway service was inaugurated and after WWII. So demand increased. And the line went from 2-car shuttles only to E. 180th St. to today’s ten-car “5” trains running all the way to Utica Avenue or New Lots Avenuem Brooklyn.
Suppose they had built bthe catenary with insulation bfor conversion to 11000V AC, but energized at 600V DC. Cars similar to H&M’s, which did test on the 2nd Avene Elevated before the 1905 H&M opening, and, via the Willis Avenue connecting track provided through sevice on the 2nd Avenue Elevated to Park Row - City Hall? Like the North Shore and CRT. Excuse me for repeating myself!
Is Bridgewater near Bound Brook? It would be great to see the line from there to West Trenton electrified and double track again. Amtrak trains could use it during problems with the NEC.
I agree an electrified Newark - Bound Bruuk - Jenkintown - Wayn Junction - Philadelphia makes lots of sense.
Nate Gerstein sent this photo, what had been NYW&B track:
My previous post’/s caption needed correction. Here is the full story:
FRom NaTe Gerstein: Only the center door of the deck-roofers was air-operated, they were only operated in two-car shuttles or as one car at one end only of trains of other modified-HV (high-voltage-control) cars, with the conductor at the end abutting the other cars.
The train is made up of deck roofers. They were used as horses to bring in new R-17s from the NHRR using the old NYW&B connecting track. They also moved scrap cars from the IRT tfor the scrapping of MUDCs, Gibbs, Decks, Gibbs, Flivvers and even BU gate cars. They were burnt on the grounds of the Starlight Amusement Park below the old Coliseum (Surface Transit Bus Garage)
I would date the photo as 1955. Later on the train was reduced to 4 cars. They would fill the steel cars with wood taken from the mass destruction of apartment housed demolished th build the Cross Bronx Express-way and set them on fire.
East 180 also had hoppers with coal and ballast and gondolas with rail delivered there. It was a busy place. Back to the deck-roofer with the skirt. I never knew about this car. It was a surprise to me and nobody I know ever saw it.
The Decks were built with the provision to add the center door. The openings were reinforced in the origina
Hello Dave
A correction I must offer — see below;
The TOP PHOTO (of the 3 you state as being at the Bronx E. 180th Street station area) – is actually looking northeast miles further south, from the Willis Avenue auto bridge (Bronx side) to the Willis Ave. southern terminal station and company (NHRR - NYW&B) office building of the NYW&B -NHRR at Willis Ave & E. 132nd Street, within the New Haven RR S. Bronx Harlem River Freight yards. In the foreground are seen two of the low steel trestles that connected the NYW&B track ends to the IRT 3rd Avenue Elevated tracks. The end of the stone wall marked the separation of tracks between NYW&B RR and IRT 3rd Ave EL systems.
The ONLY thing remaining in that scene today are the closed up stone stairways from Willis Ave up to the embankment top where the railroad terminal was. Everything else is completely gone.
Regards - Joe F
Newark-Bound Brook electrification was proposed in the form of converting the LV - CNJ “Aldene PLan” route to an extension of PATH in the Sixties (presumably LV and CNJ freight traffic would have continued - gotta wonder about clearances) The Newark riots put an end to that and no one has dared to bring it up since. The CNJ had an order of round roof commuter equipment in the Twenties that was identical to RDG MU cars and just needed the electrical equipment and motormans’ compartments added 
Do you mean ‘an extension of PATH’ through installing extended third rail, or reconstruction and extension of the PRR cat to Exchange Place?
Converted Reading-MU size cars would not fit in the Tubes no matter how carefully you provided depressed pans for them…
Catenary extension would provide a big leg up on electrifying the rest of the way to West Trenton…
It was to be third rail all the way to Bound Brook running PATH rolling stock. The idea was a one seat commuter ride from home to Manhattan. Like I said, the Newark Riots ended any chance of that. The CNJ cars were built for an aborted 1920’s plan to electrify Jersey City-Bound Brook via 11,000 V AC catenary. It was to link up with the equally abortive plan to electrify the RDG New York Branch West Trenton-Bound Brook.
Well this post has been around since 2013…After reviewing Google Satlite maps and Google Earth the right of way has been built over too much and had been the line used for freight and kept alive untill the 1980s it could have been rail banked and a possible rail trail. No idea how dence was population was in the 1920s when the NYW&B was running