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One of if not the original purpose in creating the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was to build a cross harbor rail tunnel for freight. Idea was to reduce and or eliminate much of the then (and still) ferry/barge traffic between New Jersey and (then) Manhattan, Bronx, and Brooklyn. It never happened and likely never will.
Those who know or knew NYC well into the 1950's will recall at one time there were several car float terminals along the west side (there were piers going from roughly where the Holland Tunnel is now right up past Christopher Street and up to West 70's), and of course Brooklyn and Bronx.
The Bronx rail yards are now largely vanishing after sitting unused for decades as real estate developers cash in. Trump's Riverside complex in the West 70's is built over a large part of the former New York Central freight/car float yards.
Of course the 1950's and 1960's being what they were everyone hated railroads and were pushing trucks/automobiles for freight. Well fast forward to now and NYC roads/bridges and other infrastructure are taking a pounding from all the truck traffic that shows no end of stopping. Nearly everything that comes into NYC reaches us by truck.
Because most if not all the old car float terminals are now gone, along with their ROWS the only thing left is the Cross Harbor. In order to send things by rail you have to move them from NJ way upstate, cross over then make some round about moves to get things back downstate/Long Island or Queens.
As stated previously due to various factors a tunnel for carrying heavy freight trains going under NYC harbor won't be easy nor cheap to build. The current Hudson River tunnels built by the PRR actually do move and sway with the currents. Because passenger locomotives and trains are lighter than freight the risk of those tunnels sinking into the river bed is reduced. Again the PRR tried early in the last century to send a freight train through North River tunnels, and it was not a success. That but an end to that idea.
I flipped through the EIS for the project. The entire thing (building the new tunnel and rehabbing the old ones) won't be done until 2030. That's the current projection. Anyone think it'll actually be done before 2040?
Any duration you find in an EIS is just someone throwing a dart at a board... blindfolded. It's not figured out with any accuracy, especially when it's underground construction. I don't believe EIS's typically have much input from people on the construction end either.
While I find the idea of a cross harbor freight tunnel intriguing and "neat", I really question the value returned for the money spent. The North River tunnels are an easy one that requires attention for obvious reasons but digging a whole new even-bigger tunnel on the promise that it may easy some traffic congestion and make the environmentalists and anti-truck crowd happy is just not going to be enough of a starter to ever get that one going.
What would ease truck traffic and get Long Island and JFK airport more accessible is to bring the Belt Parkway between 278 and 678 up to intestate highway standards to allow truck traffic a "preferred route" around the perimeter of Brooklyn instead of making them go all the way to LIE on BQE and then down the Van Wyck which is ridiculous and sends way too much traffic through those parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Or across Atlantic Ave which is even more ridiculous.
Are they going to build the tunnel? NYTimes this week did an expose on how the money is being diverted to subsidize ferry service:
Quote:
Tim Halligan sitting below deck during his morning ferry commute from Atlantic Highlands, N.J., to Jersey City. A round trip costs him $24, while the state of New Jersey chips in $95. Credit Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
That money did not come from the agency’s budget, but from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which had intended it to help fund a rail project that was known as ARC, or Access to the Region’s Core. The ARC project was designed to reduce congestion at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, the nation’s busiest railroad terminal, by doubling the capacity for trains crossing the Hudson River. It could have opened as early as next year.
But in 2010, Mr. Christie abruptly halted work on the project, saying that he feared New Jersey could have been stuck with big cost overruns. He demanded that the $1.8 billion the Port Authority had pledged to the tunnel project be redirected to road and bridge repairs in northern New Jersey.
Continue reading the main story
That is how several million dollars of the Port Authority’s tunnel money wound up subsidizing the waterborne commutes of about a single busload of New Jerseyans.
The problem really doesn't involve freight all that much; Since the early Seventies, rail freight has been "redefining itself"; high-value traffic like merchandise usually moves in containers on flat cars, and the facilities to handle these are strung out along the major rail lines well into Pennsylvania. What goes into the cities moves mostly by truck -- and likely will continue to do so for reasons like property crime concerns and higher taxes. The car-float operations cited in the original post are a shadow of what once was, Penn Central (Conrail's predecessor began diverting bulk carload traffic bound east of the Hudson to a route via Albany almost as soon as the New York Central - Pennsylvania merger got under way back in 1968.
But the movement of passengers (which for all practical terms means commuter) is another story entirely -- I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but the current impasse regarding the improvements of "Trans-Hudson" traffic (and in choosing this term, I'm including the entire Hudson Valley at least as far north as Newburgh-Beacon) seems certain to grow -- and all the politicians involved seem interested in little more than finger-pointing, and are unlikely to do more until some crisis forces everyone's hand.
People forget, for example, that, with the exception of Staten Island, "heavy-duty" commuter ferry systems have been absent from New York Harbor for just about half a century; or that all of the non-highway infrastructure, including the three rail tunnels, was originally privately-held and financed; what is commonly referred to as PATH was envisioned as the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. Since the two projects stretched out over a number of years, and this period was pretty much concurrent with the rise of "progressive" politics, it could be argued that the enterprises were "financially doomed" before the service commenced.
But the huge capital costs were already "sunk", and the service could easily generate enough cash to pay the current operating costs of wages and salaries, fuel (most of it in the form of coal-fired electric plants), and supplies, And so the game continued -- until a lot of that fully-depreciated rolling stock began to wear out, And at that point, another not-so-quick fix was arranged; conveying a useful, but not valuable (in the eyes of the financially astute) property to the taxpayer. And so the game went on.
And the level of risk continues to rise; although I'm not well-enough versed in engineering to address the specifics, but all three of the tunnels are showing the effects of a century of wear and tear; and as far back as twenty years ago (when I worked briefly in the area for Amtrak) the former Pennsylvania Railroad North River tunnels could be shut down for a few hours due to maintenance, or events such as a trackside fire.
Sooner or later, one of the tunnels is going to face a disruption that can't be resolved in a few hours, and what's worse, while the "cargo" is capable of trans-loading itself, the movement of the burden to the two remaining facilities might lead to a second breakdown -- the longer the interruption, the greater the risk. I can only hope that those enterprises and institutions which are at the greatest peril have given some serious thought to the , because there are probably a few "jokers in the deck" which could make Katrina or the events of 9/11/01 seem mild in comparison.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 07-09-2017 at 12:19 PM..
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