The Interborough Express: When the Bay Ridge Line Gives You Half A Loaf, Take It

Governor Hochul's official sanctioning of a long-discussed circumferential transit route via freight-only rail lines excited a lot of people, and it should. The proposed Interborough Express would help rebalance a subway system that was mostly built to carry passengers to and from Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. In an era when travel patterns are becoming more diffuse and the notion of commuting 5 days a week to a central business district office is no longer gospel (or even necessary for people who can telework), the Interborough Express is a solid choice to share scarce capital dollars with Phase 2 of the 2 Avenue Subway. It would connect outlying portions of the the 4 Avenue (R), Sea Beach (N), West End (D), Brighton (Q), Nostrand Avenue (2,5), Canarsie (L), Jamaica (J,Z), Fulton Street (A,C), Atlantic Branch (LIRR), Myrtle Avenue (M), Queens Boulevard (E,F,M,R) and Flushing (7) lines with each other, greatly speeding up a lot of now-cumbersome transit journeys and generally making flowers bloom everywhere.

There are, however, some limitations to these still-active freight routes, known as the Bay Ridge Line from Upper New York Bay to Fresh Pond Junction and the Fremont Secondary north of there. These lines assumed their current forms over a century ago in a very different city -- passenger trains even plied part of this route until 1924. Changing land uses, operations, regulations, and environmental attitudes have left the MTA with a lot of obstacles to overcome to get such a vital project off the ground. A brief tour of these impediments is in order, but so is a look at how each one can be overcome. Let's start with ...

1) an inconsistent right-of-way. From Upper New York Bay to just west of 14 Avenue, and again from the Brighton (B,Q) Line to Fresh Pond Junction, the Bay Ridge Line has at least a four-track right-of-way. (It's been a long time since there were actually four tracks along a lot of it, but these pictures and maps don't lie, and neither does the city's own 1924 aerial photos.) Aside from a short three-track-wide area in Kensington, the rest of the line -- including the Fremont Secondary north of Fresh Pond Yard, which will bring the Interborough Express up to the all-important 74 Street-Broadway-Roosevelt (7,E,F,M,R) station -- is two tracks wide. The good news here is that according to the Department of City Planning's ZOLA maps, virtually this whole right-of-way is wide enough to support four tracks (though the All Faiths Cemetery area just north of Metropolitan Avenue might be tricky). The bad news is that a whole lot of underpasses and overpasses will need to be rebuilt to make four tracks a reality, to say nothing of all the new retaining walls needed. This is important because the governor's State of the State message, in which she pushed for the Interborough Express, also included kickstarting the long-delayed Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnel project, and if you're going to build that, you have to keep freight access up to at least Fresh Pond Yard and likely the whole Interborough Express route. So a four-track ROW is ideal along the whole stretch, because otherwise we'll all have to deal with expensive...

2) FRA crashworthiness standards. Unlike the subway system, the City's commuter and freight lines connect to the national railroad network, putting them under Federal Railroad Administration regulation. Among other things, that means that each vehicle on these rails has to adhere to crashworthiness standards, and while the FRA has shown greater willingness in recent years to consider how to apply these standards to new railcar and locomotive designs, you can't get around the FRA, nor should you want to. On four-track stretches, where you can throw a fence up splitting the right-of-way between freight and passenger uses, that's not such a big deal. It's the two- and three-track sections that get tricky. Yes, one-track passenger operation can be done, but that limits capacity and constricts scheduling options. Absent four tracks, a better option is temporal separation, which splits up the day between times when only freight traffic can use the whole line and when only passenger traffic can, eliminating costly crashworthiness retrofits. We don't have to look far for examples: Newark Light Rail initially operated under time separation rules when it extended its route from Branch Brook Park to Grove Street in 2002, and the River Line from Trenton to Camden has been doing it since it opened in 2004, as this 2011 FTA report amply explains. While this might fly in the face of New York City's pride in having a 24-hour subway system, wouldn't an Interborough Express that runs frequent service every day from 6:00am to 11:00pm be a lot better than none at all? Of course, even with temporal separation, the two track-segments may require ...

3)?low-level platforms to keep overwide freight trains from mangling them. New York City doesn't have such platforms anymore, though the nearby Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and Newark Light Rail lines do. But until someone builds a Bayonne-to-Bay Ridge passenger connection, that means that we'll have to order ...

4) an entirely new low-floor train fleet, and build ...

5) entirely new yards and maintenance facilities.? That's equals a lot of money, a lot of yard space, and a whole new set of operating practices, and creates a pinch point where either upgrading the entire line to a four-track right-of way or making the whole thing a dedicated temporally-separated busway with inlaid freight tracks starts to make economic sense. As stated above, upgrading to four tracks means that you can fence off two passenger-only tracks, build physical track connections to the existing subway network, and use the standard subway car fleet and high-level platforms. The easiest places for connections would likely be along the parallel Sea Beach (N), Canarsie (L) and Myrtle Avenue (M) lines. Even more intriguing -- and I know this dismays a lot of transit advocates -- is the potential for a high-capacity busway with not just an end-to-end Interborough Express but a whole bevy of other routes that enter and exit the corridor at intermediate points and more thoroughly serve whole chunks of Brooklyn, Queens, and even Staten Island. Industry City to JFK? Gateway Center to Queens Center? Maybe even Clove Lakes Park to Prospect Park? Bus routes which run along part of the alignment and exit at selectively-built turnoffs could make them reality. Again, we don't have to look far for a good example: the CTfastrak system is doing exactly this south and west of Hartford. But then of course there's ...

6) 5 miles of neighbors' houses and apartments directly abutting the right-of-way, especially on the open cut segments. Just over one-third of the 14-mile Interborough Express route passes by residential lots that are not separated from the tracks by an intervening street, and those residents are going to have something to say when over 50 years of relatively light freight traffic potentially turns into a train every 5 to 15 minutes. The MTA will likely have to appease many of these property owners with soundproof walls, berms, and/or decking -- and decking is a non-starter until zero-emission freight locomotives are the norm. (Fortunatlely, that day may not be far off.) Clean-power trains and locomotives are great, partially because the Interborough Express's tracks may sit on top of ...

7)?over a century of toxic crap. Oil, ash, and all of the other fluids that have kept locomotives running since at least 1918 when the current alignment was entirely grade-separated have likely seeped into the ground, along with random cargo spills and leakages. Some New Yorkers also have a long, inglorious history of using this line as their personal or professional dumping ground. All of that junk that's seeped into the dirt is going to need to be remediated, at least around the station areas. (A lower standard of cleanliness might apply between stations.) To do that, the MTA is going to have to dig up some dirt, and that leads us to ...

8) the Buckeye Pipeline. Oh yeah, that thing. Better call 811, because it runs under a sizable chunk of the alignment, and even though it's encased in concrete and/or steel, you don't want to rupture it. There's jet fuel in there. I'm sure Buckeye Partners, L.P. will want to know about any major changes to railroad traffic above its asset.

It may seem like these constrictions will make the whole Interborough Express just another idea that will be thrown onto the City's massive slag heap of unrealized transit improvements, but these limitations also bring opportunities to engage with stakeholders about ways to make the whole project better, not just operationally, but for the surrounding communities. All of these problems are surmountable, and if the end result isn't a 24/7 subway line, it can still be a massive improvement that will make innumerable lives easier. Even if it isn't perfect, let's try to build it anyway.

I am a current New York City employee and a former employee of MTA New York City Transit. This article is a personal opinion, and does not reflect official government policy of either the City of New York or the MTA.