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 · 4h 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.
Animats · 4h 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.
> 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 · 2h ago
Some countries "destroyed" their own railways systems in favor of roads, buses and trucks. Progress they say. It's sad.
jcranmer · 5h 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...).
damnitbuilds · 2h 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.
chgs · 28m 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)
jajko · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
brnt · 45m 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.
mcfedr · 4h ago
Only Americans call trains old fashioned
rafram · 4h 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.
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 · 3h 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.
No comments yet
huhkerrf · 4h 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:
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.
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...
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.
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...).
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.
[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.
No comments yet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...
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.