NEW YORK, NY May 28, 2003 — For decades, business and political leaders have talked about improving railroad access to New York City - mainly, to spare local streets, lungs and retail prices from the costly truck traffic. WNYC's Fred Mogul reports on a once-common type of railroading that could make a comeback - if it doesn't go extinct first.

The part of his job that train conductor Jimmy Lada likes most is the part that makes the New York Cross-Harbor Railroad unique -- and a bit bizarre.

LADA: Floating. I love doing this. This is perfect, you now? It's not like any other railroad does this, you know? It's different. It's totally different.

But what Lada's doing right now used to be quite common: floating rail cars to different points around the New York City waterfront. It makes for a strange sight: fourteen or so cars - bunched together in short rows on a barge and pulled by a tugboat on the water, instead of parading in a straight line, pulled by a locomotive on the tracks.

LADA: You do some switching in the yard. Put the cars on the float. You ride over, go across the harbor to Jersey side, get to enjoy the view and everything... Everyday, you see something new. Like here in Jersey, it used to be a forest, swamp land. Now you got BMW, you got Mazda. You have Tropicana in there.

Behind Lada is Brooklyn, where there are many port terminals, but only two that let trains roll on and off moveable piers called "float bridges," both owned by the city. One is a cranky old pier in Sunset Park that the Cross-Harbor Railroad uses but is being evicted from. And the other is a modern, $20-million-dollar facility in Bayside that the city built with Cross-Harbor in mind - before relations soured between the two. This new high-tech "float bridge" was completed three years ago and has never been used. The Cross-Harbor Railroad's bid to operate it was rejected. Company President Wayne Eastman believes no one else even placed a bid.

EASTMAN: Someone needs to use those float bridges. They're a public facility. We'll just bring the boats up, park the boats, let them, whoever they want, load and unload them. We want to preserve rail traffic to the region across the harbor.


The city won't say why the three-year-old facility still has no operator. But in various filings, the city has accused the Cross-Harbor Railroad of being a bad tenant at its current home, with both financial and environmental problems. Unless its appeal succeeds, the Cross-Harbor's eviction from Sunset Park will take effect next month. City Councilman David Yassky chairs the Waterfronts Committee. He can't believe the city is letting this multi-million-dollar rail link lie dormant at a time when city is supposedly trying everything to raise money.

YASSKY: They're saying that the CHRR hasn't done this, hasn't done that. And maybe they're not the best company in the world. Fine. But then get somebody else in to run it. Having a brand new facility sit unused while businesses are paying thousands of dollars more than they need to to truck things in and out of New York City isn't the answer.

Taking freight into and out of New York on trains, in general, is rare - never mind trains on barges. For decades, trucking has grown steadily, as highways expanded. Take Chris Davey, and his business, Plywood Specialties. Until last summer, the construction supplier was in Brooklyn, importing lumber and sheet-rock on floating train cars from Jersey City, care of the Cross-Harbor Railroad line. Now Plywood Specialties is in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and uses trucks.

DAVEY: I was getting product delivered into NY for x price. Now I have to get stuff delivered into NJ and then go across the bridges every day. So I save money by not getting it delivered into the city, but then I pick up the expense on the tolls going in. And the net result is it's almost the same to a little bit cheaper.

For Davie, transportation was just one factor in the move to Jersey, along with lower taxes, insurance and labor costs. Still, there are many who say the government effectively subsidizes truck traffic, Councilman Yassky says.


YASSKY: We should be doing everything possible to take trucks off the road. Instead, we have the city government basically requiring that trucks come in here. In New York City, two percent of goods come in by rail, 98 percent by truck. That is just the worst way of transportation for the environment. It spews diesel into the air, and in a city where we now know one out of every eight residents has asthma - we've got one million people with asthma - to rely on truck traffic is just crazy. And it destroys the roads and causes us millions of dollars extra in infrastructure costs than we otherwise would have.

The Giuliani administration conducted a two-year study that recommended building a multi-billion dollar rail freight, expanding the rail-float network and increasing commercial tolls 35 percent, to make trucking less attractive. Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city's Economic Development Corporation, or EDC, is conducting another study, to figure out where a tunnel would go. Tony Riccio was the EDC head in the 1970s and 80s and is the senior vice president of the Harlem River Yard, in the Bronx, today.

RICCIO: Since the 60s, government has been trying, and has been floundering to improve the rail network. Rail is not a cure-all. People talk about the elimination of truck traffic and it'll all disappear. Just the opposite - wherever you have a modern rail terminal, you have connected with it enormous amounts of truck activity.

In Jersey City, Jimmy Lada and a Cross-Harbor Railroad crew are starting to off-load box cars onto the company's "float bridge" - a rail pier, raised and lowered by winches, housed in a series of ramshackle huts. "It looks like Frankenstein was created here," one executive says, proudly, but it seems to work. Cross-Harbor Railroad officials say they'll stay in business, based here in Jersey City, even if they're evicted from the terminal over in Brooklyn. But rail-floating will have to get a lot more busy and prosperous, before Frankenstein gets a face lift.