Mary McTamaney

A CSX freight train inched past my windows last week so slowly it barely made noise. Then another also creaked past just as slowly a while later. That is uncommon, and made me wonder what was happening along this west shore rail line to delay the trains. Was there an accident or crucial repair somewhere to the south of Newburgh?

Repairs cause far more delays than accidents along our tracks because Newburgh now has just one freight line where north and southbound engines take turns under one dispatch authority.
This west shore line through Newburgh used to have two sets of tracks that ran beside the Hudson River (as Dutchess County still does) and wide rail yards with a spiderweb of sidings where freight cars were maneuvered to be separated and combined with engines heading in every direction. Yes, trains entered and exited Newburgh to and from all compass points. Active tracks ran up the Quassaick Creek valley, beside and across industrial streets inside the City of Newburgh and a train ferry even crossed the Hudson from our shore to Fishkill Landing to carry coal cars ready to be hitched to other engines and pulled off to New England.

Many Newburgh residents worked in jobs that involved the railroads. If they weren’t direct employees of the many rail lines like the Erie, the West Shore, the New York Central, the O&W, etc., they worked in businesses that relied on a train arriving at their freight door to load or unload goods. A careful look at Newburgh’s current streetscape still reveals traces of steel rail crossing the pavement in several neighborhoods where factories, warehouses, coal yards and lumber yards were active into the 1970’s.

One nineteenth century plan that would have transformed Newburgh’s waterfront rail system never came to be because of a great national recession in 1893 just as Newburgh industrialist Homer Ramsdell was drawing up the plans shown here. Mr. Ramsdell was the region’s biggest industrialist and the owner of the majority of commercial land in Newburgh in the last decades of that century. With all the goods being loaded through the busy port of Newburgh, Ramsdell envisioned a giant warehouse at the foot of Washington Street. There, various railroad corporations running their trains through Newburgh leased track space in the extensive rail yard along Newburgh’s south shoreline. The plan would have required massive infrastructure changes. There was no elevated trestle as there was a few blocks north over the retail district. Getting to the shore would require a tunnel under the Erie Railroad’s many lines. Mr. Ramsdell and his planners envisioned a tunnel that would take up part of Washington Street’s right-of-way. Then they would shunt regular traffic to a pair of short streets wrapping around the tunnel: Little Ann Street (which some of us old-timers recall) and a diagonal lane linking Little Ann to Washington. The tunnel itself would run southeast under the tracks and exit onto a new section of Front Street to be created in the western side of the shipyards.

It was an ambitious concept to enlarge Newburgh’s port capacity. The Panic of 1893 ended such expensive dreams for the Homer Ramsdell Company. The big neighboring Wright Engine Works shown across Water Street in Mr. Ramsdell’s design drawing certainly fell victim to that Panic. Even without recession, the scale of the proposal, once it got to the specific drawing stages, might have turned Newburgers away once they realized how a giant eight story grain and freight elevator would dominate our harbor view and what a traffic snarl Mr. Ramsdell’s tunnel system would cause for Newburgh’s southside.

One thing is certain. The birds-eye view that flatters the concept drawing would not have been the way Newburghers or visitors would actually have seen their waterfront after such a monolith rose on our horizon – the horizon that had long been protected as the view from the sacred grounds of Washington’s Headquarters.