I’ve been AWOL lately, wrapping up work on one feature story for Trains and starting work on the next. That first story you’ll see when the October issue gets delivered in late August (yes, it is amusing that an October issue comes in August, but that’s the magazine biz for you). I’m supposed to be a retiree and would dearly love to kick back and do absolutely nothing for a long while. But I labor on, and when you finish reading this little essay you’ll understand why.
Conrail Shared Assets is the subject of that October feature. It’s what is left of Consolidated Rail Corporation after CSX and Norfolk Southern bought that railroad and in 1999 divided the spoils between them. Problem was, they couldn’t figure out how to divide Conrail’s trackage in Northern New Jersey, the Philadelphia area (actually more South Jersey than Philadelphia) and Detroit without giving enormous commercial or operational advantage to one of the two buyers and screwing the other. So the two railroads agreed to leave Conrail as it was in those locales and hire someone to run the three switching operations on behalf of the owners. Ron Batory turned out to be that someone, and it was to his office in Mount Laurel, N.J., that I headed to begin reporting the Conrail piece.
I mentioned to Batory that Conrail’s lines in Northern New Jersey, across from New York City, utterly baffled me, comprising parts of the former Pennsylvania, New York Central, Jersey Central, Lehigh Valley, Reading, Erie and Lackawanna networks (and I may be forgetting a railroad or two). They’re like cooked spaghetti, I said for added effect. Ron said he understood. As a young employee of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton he had literally walked his way over its massive Detroit terminal trackage in order to understand it better. I replied fine, but I didn’t have time to walk up and down North Jersey, and besides, I have feet so flat they almost got me rejected for military service.
“Tell you what we’ll do then,” he said. “I’ll call a crew to go on duty at Oak Island tomorrow morning. We’ll find a couple of big new locomotives for you. They’ll take you and Matt [Matt Van Hattem, Trains senior editor] from one end of North Jersey to the other and back again in a kind of circle with a figure eight thrown in. I’ll get Eric Levin [superintendent of motive power] and Tim Tierney [chief engineer] to go with you. And Fred, when you get back to Oak Island, I guarantee you’ll understand North Jersey.” I can still see the grin spread across Batory’s face as he said this.
So that is how it came to be that on a beautiful Wednesday morning in late June, Manhattan clearly visible in the distance, Matt and I set off on our priceless experience of being escorted over some of the densest railroad infrastructure in the world on our own two-locomotive private train, Eric providing historical perspective, Tim relating the operational oddities, and the locomotive engineer local color, also offering to stop whenever we wanted to get off to take photographs. C’mon folks, think: Have you ever had a railroad experience to top that? No you have not, is the answer. And I got paid by Trains to do this, too.
To finish this account: We started on the Garden lead, adjacent to Oak Island Yard, and went down the Chemical Coast Secondary as far as Port Reading Yard, then used the Port Reading Secondary to Bound Brook, where we reversed direction and headed up the Lehigh Line. Just before the Lehigh gets to Oak Island, we veered north and then east over the Passaic & Harsimus Line past the CSX Kearny intermodal terminal and the Hackensack River on an enormous drawbridge. Just past the river, we turned north on the Waldo Running Track, passing within sight of the NS Croxton intermodal terminal and joining the River Line. We ended up at the Ridgefield Heights auto terminal, a few miles into CSX-owned territory. Then we reversed direction again, stopping at the Amtrak Northeast Corridor overpass next to the Hudson tunnels for some photos (actually, two CSX freights were stopped ahead of us, so we weren’t going anywhere for a while). From control point Croxton, we entered the National Docks Secondary, went through the recently-enlarged Waldo and Bergen tunnels and crossed the throat of Newark Bay on another humongous drawbridge and came to a stop on the Garden lead of the Doremus Avenue auto terminal, 100 feet from where we started.
Six hours had gone by. More than once Matt and I had given each other looks that said the readers of Trains would appreciate the hard work we had just done for them. No, we didn’t think that at all. We know you people better than that. We each thought the readers of Trains, were they to know what we had just done, would want to slit our throats in jealous rage. Were the tables turned, I would.
By the way, president Batory was right. When I alighted from that CSX locomotive, I understood North Jersey at least well enough to write about it — no more spaghetti.
I had no sooner turned in the story and subjected myself to Van Hattem’s relentless fact-checking regimen (he being the article’s editor) than I emailed BNSF Railway with my next idea: Spend 24 hours at its Willow Springs intermodal terminal, to explain to readers how this small yard, completely hidden from public view in suburban Chicago, assembles and shoots out across the American Southwest each day almost a dozen 70-mph Z-class shooters and yards as many eastbounds. There is nothing in the whole wide world like Willow Springs. I expected to be told no, hell no and don’t ask us again by BNSF, that being the way of Class I railroads these days. But a classy PR gal named Krista grabbed my idea like a life jacket on a sinking ship and in a day's time got everyone at BNSF to sign off and let me (and Matt Van Hattem again) on the property. She recognized there’s one heck of a story to be told. That’s where I spent late last week. I’m still recovering from the physical challenges the experience presented to my 68-year-old body, but I don’t guess you’re going to feel sorry for me, are you? My deadline is any day now.
So that’s what I’ve been up to. Sure, as I said, I would like to do absolutely nothing except sleep late and sip martinis as the sun sets. But do that and miss opportunities like the two I just described? I don’t think so, not just yet.—Fred W. Frailey
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