Company built its own rail terminal in NYC to avoid relying on trucks

https://www.fastcompany.com/91324241/this-company-built-an-entire-rail-terminal-in-queens-to-avoid-relying-on-trucks

by JojoFatsani • 1 year ago

130 56 1 year ago

jcranmer• 1 year ago

There isn’t a bridge or tunnel to accommodate a train to Queens, although a long-planned freight tunnel is under construction.

I assume this is referring to the proposed Cross Harbor Tunnel, which the furthest it's gotten is announcing the preparation of a Tier II EIS which appears to have nobody working on it, judging from recent FOIA requests (https://bqrail.substack.com/p/no-activity-on-the-cross-harbo...).

IIAOPSW3• 1 year ago

There is absolutely a bridge or tunnel that takes a train to Queens. Its called Hells gate. Or the East River tunnels if you're ok with routing your freight ops through Penn Station (massive short cut).

One of those mostly invisible things people don't know about is the New York and Atlantic Railroad, which is basically a private group that has been contracted to take over the freight operations that were previously run by the Long Island Rail Road. You can see some of their locomotives in the picture.

The short line connecting railroad mentioned sounds like its the NY&NJ, which is actually a barge float operation between the 65th st yard and Bayonne iirc. There are certainly ways to avoid this barge, but they are rather circuitous, and could only maybe be done at night otherwise the slow freight trains would get in the way of normal passenger service on those tracks.

And describing an extra siding on the Bay Ridge Branch as a "new terminal" is a bit misleading.

hydrogen7800• 1 year ago

There is absolutely a bridge or tunnel that takes a train to Queens.

Yes, but I don't think there is a rail route to there from west of NYC. Besides barges and passenger rail tunnels, it looks like the only rail crossing over the Hudson is over 100 miles up river.

IIAOPSW3• 1 year ago

Right, but there's nothing preventing sending the freight service on the LIRR main line tunnels (other than it possibly getting in the way of passenger service, which can be avoided by doing it in the middle of the night).

These freight and passenger lines weren't built separately. They were literally part of the same railroad.

Though I do admit the shortline barge is still a reasonable option to avoid the scheduling and bureaucratic complications of the "Penn-freight" route.

paddy_m2• 1 year ago

Avoiding the barge operation means using the Selkirk Hurdle [1]. After the Hudson tunnels to Penn Station, the next rail bridge over the Hudson is at Selkirk NY, 147 miles north of Newark. It is about parallel with the northern border Massachusets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle

IIAOPSW3• 1 year ago

Sure, but there's nothing in principle which prevents just running a freight op on the commuter lines through penn station other than possibly getting in the way of the passenger schedule, but that can be solved by scheduling it between 1am and 4am when there's nothing to interfere with anyway.

mcfedr• 1 year ago

Only Americans call trains old fashioned

rafram• 1 year ago

The US moves more of its freight by rail than any other country in the world, and it’s not even close [1]. This just isn’t a very thoroughly researched article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Regiona...

lostlogin• 1 year ago

The other reply to the parent comment give a link that ranks the US lower.

But whatever the actual ranking, the volume of rail freight is very high.

eigenspace3• 1 year ago

That doesn't really contradict what that person was saying. They just said that only Americans call trains old fashioned. That can be true at the same time as it's true that American industry makes heavy use of freight trains.

huhkerrf• 1 year ago

I know this is a reflexive "America bad" tic that some people just seem to have, but by whatever measure you use, the US is in the top 10 of rail freight:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...

Qwertious• 1 year ago

Here's a metric: remove iron ore/coal shipments that only use a single fixed repeat route on a decaying network at <10MPH on un-electrified rail that hasn't been majorly maintained in 50 years.

If you remove that particular outlier (that basically drowns out everything else), the US's rail is pretty trash.

Or look at coverage; US rail companies will abandon profitable routes because they're fixated on improving the average profitability instead of absolute profits.

Nobody who knows much about railways is impressed by the US's railway system. Electrification is cheaper in the long run, and yet the US railway system is <1% electrified, because it's not profitable in the short term and all the railway companies are horrifically allergic to anything that won't be profitable within the decade. The US rail system is slowly falling apart, because while it makes sense in the long term to maintain it, it won't earn a profit now.

rdtsc• 1 year ago

Only Americans call trains old fashioned

I think most people, including journalists, don’t know or think much about trains. Or whatever they know it’s about passenger trains and they compare those with European ones.

bluGill3• 1 year ago

Trains are old fashioned. The old ways work and we should do them. They are still old.

Animats• 1 year ago

Oh, nice. That's putting fly ash in concrete, correct? That makes good concrete. Classic Roman concrete sometimes used volcanic ash and was very long-lived. If you don't have a volcano handy, fly ash from a high-temperature coal fired power plant works about the same.[1] Fly ash is captured from stack gases using electrostatic precipitators. Bottom ash is what comes out the bottom, and that's used to make cinder blocks. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and CO2 still come out as pollution, but at least they don't settle out as soot.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

Lammy• 1 year ago

They partnered with a local short-line railroad that owned a rail yard in Queens, not far from the company’s concrete customers. Then they built a terminal in the rail yard that would work for their specific needs.

So they didn't have to buy land and fight with multiple levels of government about land use, which would have been the hard part.

jmloop• 1 year ago

Some countries "destroyed" their own railways systems in favor of roads, buses and trucks. Progress they say. It's sad.

6stringmerc2• 1 year ago

Electric rail is a relatively new invention. The infrastructure and conditions for traditional methods - steam - were serious trouble from an upkeep standard headed on my time working in rail. It wasn’t some halcyon method otherwise it would’ve easily been immune to “progress” as you put it because of financial and emotional investments. Clearly that didn’t happen.

bluGill3• 1 year ago

The trolly lines removed were mostly electric. Steam trains did come first but everyone was into electric trains in the 1930s.

for freight there were different considerations and electric didn't have the needed power.

damnitbuilds• 1 year ago

Rail is the future, for passenger travel too.

No better way to travel than sitting in a train's comfortable dining car, watching the world flash by and getting where you're going.

jajko• 1 year ago

One way to travel, between certain destinations. Not so much in other cases.

Case point - Switzerland, the place of trains - coverage, precision, cleanness, small dense place. I live here. If you take a family of 4 they are roughly 4x more expensive than taking a car, even with their half-card (which for a family of four would be maybe 600 annually). Highways are still chock full of cars and its growing every year steadily. Unless you travel between train stations (or sometimes from city A to city B), but rather from/to rural areas (which are anyway connected via Post buses, having trains everywhere would ruin this country) they are much slower (ie 1h vs 3h to get to/from some mountain hiking spot). God forbid you want to travel further, cross sea or even big lake.

Don't look for salvation of personal transport there, that's a very definition of pipe dream currently.

ViscountPenguin2• 1 year ago

One nice thing is that trains niches can expand slowly overtime, and the marginal expense of running a train is much lower than the fixed cost of laying rail. As long as your government isn't dumb enough to rip up preexisting rail (here in Australia we got hit really badly by this in the 60s), the amortised cost of rail should only decrease.

The positive externalities of rail also make it cost effective to subsidize. Here in Queensland, all public transport now only costs 50c a trip (about 30 eurocents), making travel between our two largest cities (a trip of about 71km) super fast and cheap.

brnt4• 1 year ago

People don't realize is that public transport works if it's a network. The denser the network, both in time and space, the better the options is.

Here in the Netherlands there's actually fewer routes than a 100 years ago (country was full of local 'intertown' trams then). Housing stock has expanded a few times over since the war, but rail routes (light of heavy) stayed put. It's ridiculous to build a 5000 home neighborhood and not plunk down some steel bars! Or at least reserve the space. Meanwhile, bus services are down YoY in frequency, reach. They now basically only serve as a last resort for those that really have no other options and thus can be forced to deal with incredible transit durations.

Even cycling, which in denser cities can absorb some of the commuter traffic, is not encouraged as part of mixed transport. Tax law is such that one modality can be compensated.

The Netherlands has none of the geology to deal with that Switzerland has, so I don't know what excuse there is. All energy went into cycling I suppose. Not bad, but it's about the network, and never about the one modality.

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

Most travel is either in-city or intercity. Trains obviously cannot and should not cover every use case.

chgs2• 1 year ago

A “dining car” means very few passengers per vehicle. That’s not how real rail tends to work, just tourist jollies (there are exceptions, but even then the vast majority of passengers do not use the facilities)

eigenspace3• 1 year ago

Here in Germany we very much have 'real rail', and every high speed long distance train has a dining car. Our trains have very high passenger counts too. I think the standard ICE-4 carries around 800-900 passengers depending on the number of carriages. The dining car takes up just one carriage and is a very nice addition to the train experience. The hot food is usually not the best, but it's better than nothing, and it's very nice to go grab a beer, coffee, or pastry and stretch your legs in the middle of a journey.

This is normal pretty much throughout europe on long distance trains. I know at the very least it's standard in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. Maybe you're thinking of regional commuter trains that don't have dining cars?

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

Many long-distance intercity trains would still have a dining car, though it certainly wouldn't be able to accommodate all passengers!

Over the last few decades they have generally died out on shorter intercity routes, granted.

6stringmerc2• 1 year ago

Contingent of community planning and political atmosphere is a serious caveat. North Texas is doing its best it seems with light rail but it’s an uphill battle on these flatlands. High speed rail is a political nightmare though the use case is extremely strong.

The future is actually some kind of teleportation, which is equally feasible in places like where I live when rail is dead on arrival.

hnthrow90348765• 1 year ago

I think we'll need more time off for workers if we want them to take vacations via railway

bux93• 1 year ago

Nice bit of PR for this company, but surely traintracks and terminals are built all the time to factories? Like the Ford/Blueoval facilities in Stanton, Tennessee and Glendale, Kentucky, Scout motors in Blythewood, South Carolina, Redwood materials in Ridgeville, South Carolina, VinFast in Moncure, North Carolina, Cirba Solutions in Lancaster, Ohio, Watco in Glendale, Arizona - just some of the ones from the past few years in the US. Mostly EV/battery operations.

delfinom• 1 year ago

They are in other parts of the country.

The problem is NYC/NY are quite solidified and building new rail lines is neigh impossible as you'll need to start eminent domaining land or, spending years fighting NIMBYs for land that is already zoned and allocated for the use.

The only news here is they found an existing property with rail connections they can piggy back on.

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

"New terminal" seems like a slightly grandiose way to describe this.

paddy_m2• 1 year ago

I am trying to figure out how Switzerland has such a thriving freight rail system. My understanding is that not only do they haul bulk cargo (grain, cement, oil, coal), but also small packages at a much higher mode share than any other nation. I want to find an article describing how their operating practices make that possible. Rail switching, and even container operations adds a lot of latency vs trucking. I know that basically all of their rail, including freight is electric which helps a bit with higher reliability than diesel and better acceleration.

I have heard that rail is heavily subsidized, and trucking is possibly taxed. But their operating procedures have to account for a lot of it.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

There isn’t a bridge or tunnel to accommodate a train to Queens, although a long-planned freight tunnel is under construction.

Which one? Hope she isn’t referring to the gateway project.

This is a classic Elon musk project-problem. Hyperloop freight to NYC for the next ten years and then converting that to people travel. And then to commuter travel over the course of fifty years. Govt funding would be needed because no one would be able to predict how much travel will change in the next 50 years. But a gamble is worth it.

Company built its own rail terminal in NYC to avoid relying on trucks

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