N.Y.-N.J. port has ambitious plan for rail yard
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved the purchase and redevelopment of a rail yard in New Jersey.
The port's board of commissioners authorized the expenditure of $118.1 million for one step in the ambitious project, to eventually use yard for three different purposes:
' Ferrying rail cars across the Hudson River.
' Loading containers filled with New York City trash bound for landfills.
' As an intermodal container transfer facility for ocean containers moving to and from inland destinations.
Part of the $118.1 million will go toward the purchase of about 47 acres of upland property and 72 acres of riparian rights at Greenville Yards, a century-old rail yard in Jersey City, N.J.
Another portion will be used to repair the existing railcar float system that operates between the Greenville Yards in Jersey City and a site at 51st Street in Brooklyn. Eventually the port also hopes to run rail barges to a larger terminal at 65th Street in Brooklyn.
The funds will also be used to purchase a larger barge for the rail ferry and a low emissions rail locomotive.
The port authority also authorized its executive director to negotiate with a third-party operator to design, construct and operate a special terminal at Greenville that would be capable of handling sealed containers of trash. The trash would be loaded into sealed containers at transfer stations in New York City, placed on barges and moved across the harbor, then lifted off the barges and loaded onto rail cars at the new terminal to be carried to landfills in other states.
The city has a similar facility for transferring containers of trash from barges to trains on Staten Island, and the new facility in New Jersey has the potential to remove up to 360,000 trash trucks annually from New Jersey highways as well as the tunnels and bridges operated by the port authority when completed in 2013.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has pressed the port authority to take action on the Greenville plan, which will be funded with $89 million from federal and state funds and $30 million from the port authority.
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Rick Larrabee, head of the port authority's port department, said in recent decades with the decline of railroads in the Northeast, other car floats in New York harbor ceased to exist or fell into disrepair. That was also true of the Greenville facility where only one of four rail bridges used to move rail cars from land to barge was still functioning.
Since freight trains are not allowed in Amtrak's North River Tunnels, and the Poughkeepsie Bridge was closed in 1974, the cross-harbor car float system is the only Hudson River rail freight crossing within 140 miles of New York City.
Greenville Yards today forms the western terminus for port authority-owned New York New Jersey Rail LLC, which moves about 1,500 loaded rail cars per year.
The port authority is funding an ongoing study on how to best move cargo across the harbor that is examining not only carfloats, but also the idea of building a rail freight or multimodal tunnel beneath the harbor. The study is expected to be competed in August 2011.
The port authority also has plans to eventually build an intermodal rail yard at another section of the Greenville Yards that would be used to move marine containers to and from ships that use the Global Marine Terminal or a new facility that the port plans to build adjacent to Global that was used for auto shipments. ' Chris Dupin
