Russ Nelson : railroads

I have a database of every railbed ever constructed in New York State. From that database, I've made a Google Mashup. I don't usually give the entire database to the mashup because it's a 2.7MB file. Takes a while to compute and a while to download. I did it today, though, and took a screenshot of it (below). The interesting part is that the entire state is covered with a mesh of railroads except for the southern and central Adirondacks, and a little bit of the Catskills.

New York State Department of Transportation did an inventory in 1974 of all the abandoned railroad right of ways in New York State. They were published as typewritten documents, and so never existed as text on a computer. They're currently available as PDF files. But Google seems not to have found those files, which is no surprise, because they're hidden behind a search box. OOPS! I'm taking the liberty of turning them into HTML documents and reposting them on the web. They're a little rough right now, but you can take a look at them in their unfinished state.

A quick google search shows some people with their own definition of "Ferromancy", but the way I heard it used this weekend was "an almost magical ability to detect the presence of a former railroad." I was down in the Beacon, NY area for a bus trip exploring the remains of a Central New England railroad, specifically the Newburg, Dutchess & Connecticut. There were some portions of the railroad which required Ferromancy to detect. It went through people's front yards and they mostly plowed it into nothingness. But next to a bank, we saw a culvert at 90 degrees to the bank's road, and parallel to the direction of the railroad.

I've started a page for the Unfinished Railroads of New York State. These are railroads which got past the design state into the building stage, but not to the operational stage. In other words, a hump of dirt in the woods, or a set of abutments bracketing a stream which don't necessarily have a railroad on either side of them.

Been spending a few evenings this past week working on the Rutland Trail. There's a few sections which are perennially wet. Not just damp wet, or even soft wet. We're talking "standing water" wet. The worst puddle is about 30' long, and 12" deep. Threatens to overwhelm my boots.

The primary cause of these puddles is blocked drainage ditches. Sometimes the people who cleared the ties were careless, and allowed the tie to lie in the bottom of the ditch. Sometimes trees have grown up in the ditches, and their roots collect leaves, twigs, and dirt. Sometimes people have created farm crossings without regard of the need for drainage.

The problem with ATVs is the same problem that hikers face. Once a trail stays even a little bit wet, the soil gets soft and sticky. It sticks to the bottom of hiker's boots (or ATV tires) and gets carried away. As the wet soil is removed, a lower spot is created. This accumulates more water and the process goes around again. There are only two solutions: stay off the trails when they're wet, or dry out the trail.

Hiking trails tend to be sloped, and so removing water from the trail is a simple matter of inserting a water bar. This acts as a dam to channel the water off the trail. Where hiking trails are flat, it's hard to dry them out. There is no natural mechanism for removing the water. Not so on a railbed converted to a trail. A railroad also needed to keep the railbed dry, so they put ditches on the sides of the track, to remove water. Drying out a rail-trail is simply a matter of maintaining these existing ditches.

So I dug lots of leaves and sticks out of ditches this week. Found a tie in one, which I was able to pry out with a prybar (as one would expect a prybar to be used). Once I could get a hand-hold, I was able to shift it. Not so for another tie. It had been used as a farm crossing, and had gotten quite a covering of dirt. Even after I shoveled the dirt off, I couldn't shift it. Got the chain with a grab hook, and a slip hook, and the come-along, and moved that puppy out of the way. So now four puddles are draining into the ditch, instead of accumulating water and eroding the trail as one puddle drained into another.

Next puddle to go is the worst one. It'll be a supreme pleasure to dry that one out.

Went for a hike exploring the Brooklyn Cooperage logging railroad line into Everton. They pulled the tracks up in the 1920's, so it hasn't been so very many years. I found the location of the curve at Everton. The railroad is drawn as crossing the St. Regis River and recrossing it a short distance thereafter. That's certainly possible. There's not too much room between the road and the river at that point. Neither, though, did I see any sign of bridge abutments. If it was a wooden trestle bridge, it may not have had abutments.

Also found evidence of a side track north from the curve. Tie impressions, and grading. If it existed at all, it was probably just for one year, while they were logging in the area. Some time in the late 1980's I saw evidence of ties.

Further out on the rail line, it crosses Mile Brook. You can still see some remains in the wetland here: .

I hiked north along the railbed, and found another branch crossing Mile Brook. The line to the left continues northwards. The line to the right is still used as a path across the wetland: .

The best part, though, is that I found rails!. I have no idea why a pair of rails would have been left behind: . This wasn't the last place that Brooklyn Cooperage had a logging railroad, so something must have prevented them from removing those rails.

Kept walking out on the railbed. Except for a few muddy places where some vehicle dug nasty holes at some time in the past, the railbed is still in reasonable condition. I think I found the end of the northwest branch, because there's no sign of the railbed past that point.

While visiting Rediff.com, my friend Sumit Rajwade took me up to the community of Matheran, between Mumbai and Pune. It's what the Indians call a "hill station". It's a town perched on the top of a hill. Matheran is especially attractive because, although you can drive up to the top, the community does not allow any automobile traffic. On the top of a hill like that, the air is refreshingly clean. With a forest covering the entire hill, it's also cool. Small wonder people go to all the effort to get up there.

I was surprised and pleased to find a two-foot narrow gauge railway going up to Matheran. It winds its way up a ridge leading to the steepest section, and then uses four or five switchbacks to get the rest of the way up. Unfortunately, it wasn't running in December of 2005 because of the damage from the exceptional July 2005 monsoons.

After wandering around on the top, and seeing the old steam engine installed in a shed as a memorial to the railway's builder, we made our way down to the bottom and Neral. The railway meets up with the standard gauge railway there, and has its facilities at that end of the line. You don't see many operating narrow-gauge railways these days, but this is not a tourist railway (in the sense that people come to see the railway -- people use the railway to get to Matheran).

Vivek Manvi apparently got to ride the train back in July 2005.

Back in Mumbai several days later, I snapped a photo of Sumit and Siddhartha in his car, and a timer shot inside Rediff's offices. While flying back over low clouds, I noticed a circular rainbow around the airplane's shadow.

Created a webpage for the Rutland Trail a few months ago. That's not news anymore. However, I also figured out how to use Google Maps' api, so the map image now links to a gmap using blue vectors to show the route of the trail on a map. I liked that so much that I took my database of NY railbeds, and put each one of them on its own gmap.

I visited the Wilkes-Barre and Hazelton Railway on Saturday night. By chance, the photo I took of the remains of the station was taken from very nearly the same point that a historic picture was taken:

Some people in the house just to the right of the modern photograph told me that yes, this was the trolley line heading underneath the mountain. They said that the tunnel was blocked about 1/4 of the way. Being a half-mile tunnel, that implies that you can still travel 1/8th of a mile under Penobscot Mountain. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to make the one-mile hike back to the tunnel portal to investigate.

7.45 km 24456.07 feet 4.63 mi 9505.00 seconds 158.42 minutes 2.64 hours 1.75 mi/hr

Went looking for more of the Clifton Iron Mine Railroad. They only operated it for a few years, because the rails were made of wood. They later put iron straps on the top, but that didn't help much. It created its own hazard when the strap curled up and penetrated the car from below. It can be a bit of a challenge to follow, because they used many trestles. They had a more-or-less infinite supply of trees, and earthmoving equipment was primitive at best.

The railroad went on the north side of the river until slightly east of the "BM 975", at which point it crossed the river. It proceeded to cut across a bend in the river, went on a trestle past Twin Falls, and then turned up the creek. Almost immediately up on turning due south, it goes onto a trestle to go over the creek. There's a very short section where it crests the hill that is a railbed. I have a photo of four strips of mossy soil which could be nothing other than the remains of the ties. Southward from there, it goes through a wetland on a trestle. I walked through a mostly clearcut stand of (former) timber, and peeked across the wetland to see if there was any trace left. Nothing. I'll have to go looking for it south from there on another trip.

Have to find a way to get across the Grasse river at Stewart Rapids, because most of the hike was just getting to the railbed. Maybe I could put my electronics into a watertight package, and swim across. Later .... when it's warmer. By the way, the (reputed) tornado last summer must have touched down (at least) exactly where it says "Stewart Rapids" on the map. There was an incredible amount of blowdown at that point. I couldn't say if it was circular because of a tornado or linear because of a wind shear/microburst. The Adirondacks has a tradition of wind shears, but not much in the way of tornados.