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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.

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

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.

>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.

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.

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/S09213...

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.

I think we'll need more time off for workers if we want them to take vacations via railway

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.

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.

> One nice thing is that trains niches can expand slowly overtime

Trains have been around long enough to fill their niches. There's a reason if they haven't.

Some of the headwinds are bad reasons (like status games of showing off your expensive car). However some of the reasons are because trains suck.

There's a train I love to take from my city on holiday, but it's rather inconvenient and costly.

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.

Most travel is either in-city or intercity. Trains obviously cannot and should not cover every use case.

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.

Isn’t the new bike parking facility next to Centraal in Amsterdam a massive counterexample? That clearly supports mixed-mode commuting, right?

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.

It's insane to me that some countries have such high taxes that tax breaks become the most important variable when deciding which mode of transportation to use.

You should turn that around: if getting people off the road is something you really care about then make it pay.

I take no position on which mode of transportation is preferable for others to take (though I have my own preferences, to be sure).

Where I come from, taxes are comparatively low. So it's weird to see people talking about them influencing their behavior so significantly. That's a lot of power the government has... I'd rather keep my money than let bureaucrats spend it to manipulate the public's behavior.

Taxes spent on building roads presumably significant influence your behavior.

Taxing cars puts the cost of those roads more directly on the users of them.

I'm not talking about building infrastructure or paying directly for things that cost money for the government to do, I'm talking about market manipulation.

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.)

In addition to sibling: the bike is, for many people, already, 'too cheap to meter', so the tax advantage goes to the train subscription. And quite some employers either give you a train subscription, or let you deduct kilometers travelled at some rate. That rate depends on modality, but the subscription for free is usually (always) a much better deal, _if_ you really don't need that car.

Whoever is left driving cars (which is, also in the Netherlands, a large fraction), can't for instance drive up to some remote train station, and rail the rest. That's how you can get those who still drive out of their cars; those that already take trains are covered by the rules as they are.

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.

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)

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?

And how many of those 800-900 actually eat in such a car, rather than collect something from the buffet and return to their seat.

95% of passengers are not sitting in a dining car watching the world go by in an Amtrak style experience.

every high speed long distance train has a dining car

That you're using multiple qualifiers here suggests that these could still be exceptions.

In Germany with Deutsche Bahn there are three classes of trains: Regional, Intercity, and Intercity Express.

Intercity Express is the high speed long distance train, and are the most common long distance trains by a long shot. They're the ones that have the dining cars. Regular Intercity trains usually don't have dining cars, but they're rather rare. I've still never actually ridden one because they're almost never used (since Intercity Express is so sucessful, and the Regional trains are fast enough for journeys of around 200km)

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

Ironic that the diesel that replaced steam and pure electric is actually diesel electric.

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.

> 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...).

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.

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.

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.

Only Americans call trains old fashioned

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#Regiona...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...

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.

Remove half the freight and it looks like the US transports half as much. This doesn't seem revelatory to me?

These comparisons between countries are always difficult.

Each place is adapted to the geography.

In Europe, the coal or ore may well be loaded onto a barge. The rivers here follow some useful routes, and the continent is surrounded by sea on three sides.

The USA doesn't have such convenient waterways.

Similarly, a container ship will make multiple stops around Europe, so there's less need to have a huge freight railway from Greece to the Netherlands.

> 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.

Trains are old fashioned. The old ways work and we should do them. They are still old.

"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.

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.