8 ms·

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

130 points by JojoFatsani 1y ago

rsynnott 1y ago
"New terminal" seems like a slightly grandiose way to describe this.
jcranmer 1y 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-harbor-rail https://bqrail.substack.com/p/no-activity-on-the-cross-harbo...).
IIAOPSW 1y 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 1y 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.
  - IIAOPSW 1y 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_m 1y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle
  - IIAOPSW 1y 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 1y ago
Only Americans call trains old fashioned
- rafram 1y 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#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Regiona...
  - lostlogin 1y 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.
    - RandallBrown 1y ago
      The lower ranking is total mileage tons while the highest ranking is percentage of freight moved by train. The US ranks decently high in passenger miles as well, but that's just because we're a huge country, not because trains are regularly used by people in the US.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - bombcar 1y ago
        I suspect the vast majority of passenger miles on rail in the USA are local transit and light and heavy intercity short-commute rail. Not the long-distance Amtraks across the country.
        RandallBrown 1y ago
        I guess I should have used a different word but I meant huge to imply a large population as well as area. The US is the 3rd most populous country in the world after all.
Animats 1y 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/S0921344912001085 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
Lammy 1y 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 1y ago
Some countries "destroyed" their own railways systems in favor of roads, buses and trucks. Progress they say. It's sad.
- 6stringmerc 1y 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.
  - bluGill 1y 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.
    - fuzzzerd 1y ago
      Ironic that the diesel that replaced steam and pure electric is actually diesel electric.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Not really. The problem with electric (in 1930) is the low voltage (relatively low - still 600-1000 volts!) couldn't handle the needed watts for diesel. Steam was more fuel efficient than diesel when it was replaced. But a diesel engine could start in less than a few hours, and needed one less person on the crew so it was cheaper overall.
damnitbuilds 1y 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 1y 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.
  - ViscountPenguin 1y 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.
    - ViscountPenguin 1y ago
      Side note: I ran the numbers, and a trip from the gold coast to Gympie is now one of the cheapest per km train trips on earth. Only beaten by free train zones, and lower class seats on the trans Siberian.
bux93 1y 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 1y 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.
paddy_m 1y 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 1y 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.

130 points by JojoFatsani 1y ago

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

> 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-harbor-rail https://bqrail.substack.com/p/no-activity-on-the-cross-harbo...).

IIAOPSW 1y 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 1y 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.
- IIAOPSW 1y 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_m 1y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle
- IIAOPSW 1y 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 1y ago

Only Americans call trains old fashioned

rafram 1y 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#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Regiona...
- lostlogin 1y 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.
  - RandallBrown 1y ago
    The lower ranking is total mileage tons while the highest ranking is percentage of freight moved by train. The US ranks decently high in passenger miles as well, but that's just because we're a huge country, not because trains are regularly used by people in the US.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - bombcar 1y ago
      I suspect the vast majority of passenger miles on rail in the USA are local transit and light and heavy intercity short-commute rail. Not the long-distance Amtraks across the country.
      - RandallBrown 1y ago
        I guess I should have used a different word but I meant huge to imply a large population as well as area. The US is the 3rd most populous country in the world after all.

Animats 1y 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/S0921344912001085 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

Lammy 1y 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 1y ago

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

6stringmerc 1y 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.
- bluGill 1y 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.
  - fuzzzerd 1y ago
    Ironic that the diesel that replaced steam and pure electric is actually diesel electric.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Not really. The problem with electric (in 1930) is the low voltage (relatively low - still 600-1000 volts!) couldn't handle the needed watts for diesel. Steam was more fuel efficient than diesel when it was replaced. But a diesel engine could start in less than a few hours, and needed one less person on the crew so it was cheaper overall.

damnitbuilds 1y 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 1y 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.
- ViscountPenguin 1y 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.
  - ViscountPenguin 1y ago
    Side note: I ran the numbers, and a trip from the gold coast to Gympie is now one of the cheapest per km train trips on earth. Only beaten by free train zones, and lower class seats on the trans Siberian.

bux93 1y 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 1y 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.

paddy_m 1y 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 1y 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.