How Long Island Gets Rid of Its Trash

If you've been keeping an eye on local New York news these last couple days you may be aware that a CSX freight train hauling garbage cars derailed late Thursday night while making its way through the Bronx on Metro-North's Hudson Line.  The resulting mess that ensued resulted in the suspension of service along the lowest part of the Hudson Line for the remainder of the evening,

Photos of the derailment wreckage from the MTA.

Derailments are nothing if not messy, and Metro-North crews have been working tirelessly around the clock to clean up the mess and restore the tracks to service.  At the time this post went to print, train wheels should have just begun to roll
over one of the two tracks that was damaged in the derailment and "near normal" Hudson Line service has resumed.

Photos of the derailment wreckage fro the MTA.

But looking on at the incident as a Long Islander one thing many people might know is that some of the trash on that train that derailed Thursday night might very well have come from your home!

It has often been claimed that Long Island's main export is trash, and we sure do make a lot of it.  You have trash bins inside your homes and twice a week you round up all of your trash and leave it at the curb for a truck to come and collect it.  After you wave goodbye to your now useless trash you think that its life is over, but that trash is very likely far away from its final resting point.

Most municipalities round up all of their trash and bring it to one or more waste centers where it is heaped into one huge pile of smelly garbage.  From there it is vigorously searched for loose change and crumpled up dollar bills (not really) and then the trash is sent someplace off the island to be either landfilled or incinerated.

Lots of time the toughest part about this trash removal process is getting the actual garbage off the island.  More often then not companies load their trash onto a fleet of trucks and send it off the island by road.  However, the amount of bridges off this island is limited and the fleets of trucks wanting to use those bridges is ever growing, so there is frequently lots of money wasted on gas and tolls and all like that.

However, there is one other option, a option that is growing more and more popular by the month.  These days more and more companies are looking to ship their trash out by rail.

New York & Atlantic Railway, the LIRR's semi-separate freight operator, has a ever growing business in the trash exportation industry.  NY&AR rounds up freight cars worth of trash from all different points on Long Island and eventually hands those cars over to CSX for transportation off the island and to their final resting place.  It was a little while after that handoff to CSX that that aforementioned derailment took place.

However, the route that a freight car full of trash has to take to get to its final destination is considerably longer than if it were simply trucked across a bridge.

Basically, there are two and only two ways for a freight train to get off of Long Island.  The first option is to go through the Amtrak East River Tunnels, Penn Station, and then the North River Tunnels, kinda like the Circus Train does when it visits Long Island.  However, considering that freight, tunnels, and Amtrak don't really get along well together, Amtrak (and a series of other official parties) have banned the movement of freight through Penn Station and its entry tunnels.

With one of the two possibilities closed off there leaves only one option--a very long, and out of the way option.  It's called the Selkirk Hurdle.  Basically, with the exception of the North River Tunnels (through which the movement of freight has been banned) the next available rail bridge across the Hudson River suitable for freight is many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many miles upstream.  The Alfred H. Smith Memorial Bridge crosses the Hudson River just (and I mean just) south of Albany.  That's a long ways to go only to have to backtrack all the way back down.

Below is a embedded (and clickable) Google Map showing the rough route a freight train would have to take to get from Fresh Pond Yard, the NY&AR's main sorting yard to its final destination someplace in Pennsylvania.  And no, this is not an exaggeration:

View How Long Island Gets Rid of Its Trash in a larger map on Google Maps

So at this stage you realize the routing is far from direct.  The Selkirk Hurdle involves a trip miles and miles upstream only to have to come back down again.  There are several points along the Hudson River where you can see the two sets of tracks that run right up against the water.  On the east bank is Metro-North's Hudson Line and on the west bank is the CSX River Subdivision.  A divide that could probably be easily swam across at some points involves a rail route that is miles out of the way.

Below I will semi-briefly describe the route a freight train will take to get off Long Island:

Fresh Pond Yard

(Point 1) Fresh Pond Yard
Fresh Pond Yard, which lays on the former Lower Montauk Branch, is NYA&R's main freight sorting and assembly yard.  There crews take trash cars off from all different trains coming from across their service area and they assemble the cars into one full train.  At that point the cars are moved slightly south to FREMONT junction.

(Point 2) Fremont Secondary

Amtrak's Hell Gate Bridge carries two Amtrak NEC tracks
and the one Freemont Secondary freight track.

FREMONT junction is where the NY&AR meets the rest of the national rail network.  At this junction NYA&R hands the cars off to CSX railroad, a major Class I freight carrier, who will take the cars on their Fremont Secondary off the island.  The Freemont Secondary is a single track, beat up rail line that runs north from FREMONT Junction and across the Hell Gate Bridge.  This is the same bridge that Amtrak Northeast Corridor trains take between New York and Boston.  The passenger trains do not share tracks with the freight trains, instead there are three tracks on the bridge, two for Amtrak NEC services and one for the Freemont Secondary track.

CSX's Oak Point Yard.  Do those green freight cars on the
left tracks in the photo look familiar!?

After going across the Hell Gate Bridge and up into the Bronx the freight cars arrive at their next stop, Oak Point Yard.

(Point 3) Oak Point Yard
Oak Point Yard is a major CSX assembly and sorting yard in the Bronx.  At this location here CSX takes the small amount of freight cars it gets from Long Island and combines them with many more cars they have assembled from points throughout the Bronx and much of the area.  From that point the cars are sent out on a train on their way to Selkirk Yard.

(Point 4) The Oak Point Link

CSX's Oak Point Link hugs the shore of the
Harlem River for much of its length.

From Oak Point Yard the cars are sent over the Oak Point Link, a track that links CSX's Oak Point Yard in the southeast corner of the Bronx to Metro-North's Hudson Line.  The Oak Point Link is a skimpy little one track line that runs on the very edge of the Harlem River at points.  It is clearly visible hugging the edge of the land and you can see it from any one of the Harlem River Crossings from the northeaster tip of Manhattan over into the Bronx.

The Oak Point Link joins into the Metro-North Hudson Line just north of the Metro-North Highbridge Shops, which is just south of the Morris Heights station.

(Point 5) Metro-North's Hudson Line
At this stage the freight cars join the Hudson Line and proceed on a bee-line course for the north.  This time the CSX trains are sharing the tracks with the normal commuter trains.  However, because freight trains like to get in the way of things, Metro-North typically lets CSX move over their tracks in

Trash cars moving on the Oak Point Link. Look familiar!?

the late night hours where there aren't very many trains for the freight trains to get in the way.

Rerailing efforts over the weekend.
(Photo courtesy: MTA Flickr)

Once the trains are on the Hudson Lin
e it is a straight shot north until they reach their turnoff point just south of Albany.  The Hudson Line eventually turns into the Amtrak Empire Corridor (which Amtrak recently leased from CSX) north of Poughkipsee.

(Point 5a) Derailment Site
Shortly after the freight train joined the Metro-North Hudson Line the oopsie happened.  The freight train derailed in the short, one-mile long stretch of double tracking in between the Marble Hill and Spuyten Duyvil stations.  Take a look at the article linked above for more specifics on the derailment, I won't go into too much detail here, this isn't "The Metro-North Today!"

(Point 6) Alfred H. Smith Memorial Bridge
After hours of journeying up the side of the Hudson River we finally reach the Alfred H. Smith Memorial Bridge.  The southernmost freight crossing on the Hudson River, roughly 15 miles south of Albany.

The rail bridge is the darker colored one in the
foreground, the lighter colored bridge is for cars.

Just before the bridge the train exits the Empire Corridor off to the left and it takes a separate lead up track to the bridge.  The track finally swings out to the right and loops into connect with the main tracks going across the bridge and at long last out trash is able to cross the Hudson River.

From there, Selkirk Yard is only a little while away.

(Point 7) Selkirk Yard

The massive Selkirk Yard.

Selkirk Yard is a major classification and freight yard for the northeast freight network.  It is a massive "hump yard" that sits in the town of Selkirk, NY just south of Albany.  Trains from all over the Northeast come here to have their cars broken up, sorted, and sent out again on different trains to all different parts of the country.  Here's a bird's eye view of the yard.

A southbound CSX train on the River Subdivision
near Newburgh, NY

Trash cars' stays at Selkirk Yard are usually fairly short.  Within a short while the yard's extremely efficient way of processing hundreds if not thousands of cars per day quickly has the trash cars added onto a train that will be making its way down the River Subdivision. 

(Point 8) River Subdivsion
From this point the trash cars are sent out on a train back down the River Subdivision.  The River Subdivision is a freight-only line that runs south along the Hudson River, directly parallel to, and sometimes even in view of, the Hudson Line on the other side.

From here the trash cars make their way to large sorting yards in New Jersey where they are eventually put on a train and delivered to their final destination someplace in southern Pennsylvania. 

At this point the trash car has arrived at its final destination, days after it first left people's homes.  This extremely out of the way and inconvenient Selkirk Hurdle is a primary factor in why freight traffic on and off Long Island has slowed down significantly over the past few decades.  Nobody wants to wait days for a shipment to go up and down from Selkirk when they can just truck it across the George Washington Bridge and have it there in an hour and a half.

There is talk of remedying this Selkirk Hurdle issue, but that is a topic for tomorrow's post.