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Is there anyone familiar with the history of the tracks mentioned in the article below? Mayor locks horns with rail developer Freight service's revival proposed By Craig Wolf Poughkeepsie Journal A plan for revival of rail freight service is still on track in Poughkeepsie, but not if city Mayor Colette Lafuente can help it. Eyal Shapira, a developer of short-line railroads, has bought rights from CSX Corp. to operate on the defunct 4-mile ''Hospital Industrial Branch" which he'll call New York & Eastern Railway LLC. The branch goes from the Metro-North tracks along the Hudson River through the city into the Town of Poughkeepsie to Hudson River Psychiatric Center and then back into the city to the Smith Street Yards. ''The deal closed on Sept. 10,'' Shapira said. ''The deal is well and alive.'' It's a lease he expects will ripen into ownership, leading to his investing $1 million in fixing tracks and finding customers, and in the process, creating some ''good blue-collar jobs.'' He said Lafuente has been giving him grief. ''Yes,'' Lafuente said. ''Where he wants to go in the city, it has been improved significantly and it's residential and all he is going to do is create an intermodal truck transport system and it would be very damaging to the City of Poughkeepsie.'' Trucks are concern The big concern, she said, is ''all those trucks going in and out of there.'' There would be, mainly to the Smith Street Yards, in what has been for generations a mostly industrial section. Cargoes would be transferred between trucks and rail cars. But Lafuente said the trend has been toward homes, if not on Smith Street, on nearby ones like Clinton. Shapira said neither Lafuente nor any other local government can stop him because federal law gives powerful rights to railroads. And he disagrees with Lafuente's point. ''Look at developing jobs for the community,'' Shapira said. ''It's better to bring the raw material by rail than trucks because you take the trucks off the highway.'' Lafuente isn't sure the city can block it, but is looking into truck load limits. Shapira said he has customers but ''cannot mention the names until the choo-choo is going to move out there.'' Jack Effron, chairman of EFCO Products on Smith Street, can't say yet whether he'd use rail, though he's talking with Shapira about it. ''It might be a nice economic development tool,'' said Harold King, executive vice president of the Council of Industry of Southeastern New York.
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