Railroad Traffic on the River

Railroad Traffic on the River. Gantry Plaza State Park. , Not so long ago, this area looked very different. Before the construction of many of the region's highways and airports, the waterways around Manhattan, were filled with hundreds of barges, tugs, scows, and tanker moving freight. If you came here in late 1925, you would have been standing at the edge of a new Long Island Rail Road facility, watching tugboats move car floats loaded with freight across the East River to and from Manhattan., As a car float (a barge equipped with railroad tracks) approached the shore, it would be winched in tightly to a transfer bridge. Machinery housed in the black towers, called gantries, raised and lowered the wooden decks of the transfer bridge to the level of the car float, which varied depending on the tide. A locomotive then backed onto the bridge and pulled the railroad cars from the float into the freight yard., By the 1970's, the transfer bridges and the surrounding rail yard fell into disuse. The land was re-zoned to include parkland. Gantry Plaza State Park opened in 1998. Polished Granite stones in the plaza behind you recall the rails that ran between the rail yards and the transfer bridges.,

Did You Know… , . The transfer bridges here accommodated 100-ton cars. , . More than 40,000 feet of track once surrounded these transfer bridges. , . Gantries allowed 800 tons of cargo to be moved in 15 minutes. , . The transfer bridges could rise and fall 18 feet.