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.
paddy_m · 1h 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.
>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.
Animats · 8h 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.
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.
hnthrow90348765 · 47m ago
I think we'll need more time off for workers if we want them to take vacations via railway
jajko · 5h 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 · 5h 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 · 5h 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.
rsynnott · 1h ago
Most travel is either in-city or intercity. Trains obviously cannot and should not cover every use case.
brnt · 4h 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.
sokoloff · 2h ago
Isn’t the new bike parking facility next to Centraal in Amsterdam a massive counterexample? That clearly supports mixed-mode commuting, right?
withinboredom · 2h ago
You can do it because it’s easy, but when you file your taxes, you have to choose one to count as a tax break. In 2024, driving gave you the biggest tax break.
sokoloff · 1h ago
If government funds were used to build or finance the parking facility, I’d argue that’s taxes supporting/encouraging mixed mode commuting. (I have no idea if that was 100.00% private or not.)
6stringmerc · 2h 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.
chgs · 4h 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)
eigenspace · 3h 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?
dfxm12 · 46m ago
every high speed long distance train has a dining car
That you're using multiple qualifiers here suggests that these could still be exceptions.
rsynnott · 1h 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.
paddy_m · 1h 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.
Lammy · 8h 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 · 6h ago
Some countries "destroyed" their own railways systems in favor of roads, buses and trucks. Progress they say. It's sad.
6stringmerc · 2h 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 · 43m 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.
jcranmer · 10h 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...).
bux93 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
nashashmi · 28m 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.
rsynnott · 1h ago
"New terminal" seems like a slightly grandiose way to describe this.
mcfedr · 8h ago
Only Americans call trains old fashioned
rafram · 8h 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.
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.
lostlogin · 7h 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 · 7h 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.
bombcar · 14m 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.
huhkerrf · 8h 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:
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.
bluGill · 39m ago
Trains are old fashioned. The old ways work and we should do them. They are still old.
rdtsc · 7h 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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The future is actually some kind of teleportation, which is equally feasible in places like where I live when rail is dead on arrival.
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?
That you're using multiple qualifiers here suggests that these could still be exceptions.
Over the last few decades they have generally died out on shorter intercity routes, granted.
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.
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.
for freight there were different considerations and electric didn't have the needed power.
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...).
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Regiona...
But whatever the actual ranking, the volume of rail freight is very high.
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.
Not the long-distance Amtraks across the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...
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.
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.