can someone explain the rail facilities in new jersey (map)? there are two large yards near newark and smaller yards in hoboken, port reading, raritan and manville. is it typical for yards to be so close to one another? do the two yards serve different purposes? how does freight traffic get into or across manhattan?
and is that a small engine terminal with an operating turntable (map)?
thanks
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
Did you notice the area is next to one of the largest ports in the world?
Just like every major railroad in the midwest wanted to get to Chicago, every major railroad on the east coast had terminals near New York, many had multiple terminals:
PRR
NYC
LV
Reading
CNJ
DLW
ERIE
NH
Plus smaller ones.
Very little if any freight traffic goes to Manhattan (there is very little industry there). The freight is unloaded and trucked or barged into Manhattan. Freight goes around Manhattan. Passenger traffic goes through tunnels into Manhattan. There are barge lines to get freight to Long Island and Staten Island and the very, very little that goes to Manhattan itself. There were probably dozens of turntables and engine houses around New York. Most if not all the railroads listed above had their own engine facilities.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
dehusman makes a good point but did you notice that all the railroads he mentioned except one eventually became one company? conrail now csx/ns and you can include the b&o in that.
your question prompted me to get out my copy of John Droege's book Freight Terminals and Trains. in chapter one he is talking about the early 1920's and states that real estate in new jersey is about half the cost of that in new york. reading on he says, the annual food requirements for new york and i assume he means the entire metro area would require 4020 miles of freight cars.
these yards you question about were built when rail was the major transportation service in the country and long distance trucking has not come upon the scene yet. at the time he wrote this book, the railroads and terminal companies in new york operated over 1800 vessels or watercraft of some fashion just to get stuff across the hudson and east rivers.
back then railroads were carrying 63,000,000 tons of freight into and out of new york annually and interchanged 12,000,000 tons in addition to that.
a bunch of statistics to be sure but it explains all the rail yards.
grizlump
there is obviously a lot of traffic to/from NJ, NY and the Newark Seaport, but do both yards serve all 3 equally? is one CSX and the other NS, or are they jointly operated?
and again, why the outlying yards in Manville and Port Reading? Are customers near these small yards served by them, or are there locals from the yards in Newark? Are trains broken up in Manville for the two yards in Newark?
I'm guessing the yards in Raritan and Hoboken are for passenger service.
a lot of this is conjecture on my part but here goes. over a century ago, railroads were going hell bent for leather to reach major metropolitan areas. everybody had the fever. problem was they spent all their money getting to where they wanted to go and then found out there was none left for the large expensive terminals they needed so they stopped short of the high rent district and built them just outside of town.
examples are IC at Markham, south of Chicago. NYC at Elkhart Indiana, east of Chicago. PRR at Conway and Enola near but not in Pittsburg and Harrisburg Pa. PC Stanley (Toledo) mostly Detroit traffic. NYC at Avon Indiana west of Indianoplace. etc. etc.
today a lot of the rail yards in cities have been downsized or abandoned in favor of more remote areas and the traffic that is left goes in and out on transfer jobs. most of us could not afford to build a hot dog stand in Manhattan.
naturally, passenger and LCL buisiness went into the heart of the cities but most classification and interchange switching was done out in the boondocks until the city grew out to reach it.
Go back 50-100 years ago. Every RR in the northeast is going to New York. There aren't 2 yards there are 25 yards and and they all serve"New York", either directly of through interchange. The yards serve the area they are near, many of they are near the shores so they can serve dock facilities to transfer traffic to and from ships.
Port Reading was the facility for the (drum roll please) Reading Railroad. This is New York, the metro area extends for miles in every direction. Those really weren't "outlying" locations. They were in the heart of the industrial area. US railroad serve industry, that's where the money is, so the yards are where the industry is.
Now zoom to the 1968-1976 era. All the railroads serving New York are bankrupt. There is a massive consolidation of railroads ending up with more or less just one, ConRail serving New York. At the same time those thousands of little industries stopped shipping by rail and the city stopped heating by coal so traffic dropped dramatically. So CR started abandoning rail yards and consolidated them down to just a few, the ones with the best connections, in the best locations and that were in the best shape survived.
Over the years the purposes of the yards changed so that some yards served intermodal, some were more classification, etc. For example the yard in Kearney is the big intermodal ramp.
Then came the dissolution of CR and the CSX and NS split up a lot of the assets. So some of the yards have been retasked again.
dehusmanVery little if any freight traffic goes to Manhattan (there is very little industry there).
Very little if any freight traffic goes to Manhattan (there is very little industry there).
Also why motive power here is electric (traction, subway, etc.) due to NYC legal statutes. New Jersey interchanges occured for steam/diesel to electric engines. Example = Pennsy/NJT GG1s.
Conemaugh Road & Traction circa 1956
That big yard you see in Newark is Oak Island yard which used to be even bigger back in the days of the PRR It's considered part of the Eastern corridor the most heavily traveled railroad line(s) in the world. The number of trains that travel the Eastern corridor in a day is more then some small countries have in a month. Penn Station in NYC is the busiest railroad station in the world so that tells you what kind of train traffic is in this area.
Back in the day that part of NJ was virtually nothing but one big train yard as mentioned the port of NY and now the Port Authority of NY/NJ aka is I believe even busier then the port of L.A.. It's not the biggest yard in the country that title goes to The Bailey Yard of North Plat, but it is one of the busiest yards in the country.