My son and I were heading home from a college visit in Jersey, following a flatbed truck with a load of 8 highly polished, new, passenger car wheelsets. These must have been intended for MetroNorth equipment. We remarked at the Jersey Turnpike toll booth what a mess it would be if those got away. Well guess what? The truck was two car lengths ahead of us crossing the GW Bridge when the last wheelset broke free and rolled off the truck, hitting the pavement and gouging it deeply, before rolling into the center railing and squashing that! Had a passenger vehicle been between the truck and the railing, there wold be obituaries in today's paper. Pavement gouge must have been 3-4 inches deep. This screwed up traffic majorly, of course. Anyway, I may have lived to see it all, having witnessed a train wreck on the George Washington Bridge.

RDG

That's an incredible story! I often wonder why this bridge, built during the heyday of the railroads, didn't have a deck just for railroad tracks. Did the NYC and PRR keep the "orphan" roads from entering the Big Apple?

I used to go round and round with my bosses on this subject, who preferred to have everything shipped in by truck, including wheels, locomotive sand ($2000 per load in trucking costs!), diesel fuel and diesel prime movers. I noted that it didn't look very good for a railroad to not even be able to haul its own materials, and cost more besides. The ultimate, though, was when Bombardier decided to ship their unfinished subway cars down from Quebec on huge special-permit highway rigs instead instead of the flatcars they had been using. My bosses' reaction.. "it's more efficient that way". Needless to say, the RR was sold after a few money losing years, the bosses got big buyouts and retired, and the employees were scattered to the winds.

Tim:

It was supposed to.... the lower level (built 1960-62; sometimes called "Martha") was designed for either an extension of the IND-8th Ave subway then being built (1930-32), off the "A" line at about the location of the commuter bus terminal (built 1962) and across the river to north Jersey. The other alternative was NJ electric interurbans crossing to terminate at the location of the 1962 bus terminal.

The Depression cut off all discussion of those plans, and also resulted in the look of the bridge to this day-- early renderings showed that the tall lattice-work steel towers were to be clad in cut stone and brick all the way to the top. No money for that in 1932, so the structural steel has stood exposed for 70+ years.

It's becoming apparent that it's far too costly to ship trains by rail, at least for one-time moves of historic equipment, transit cars, or parts. This is a function of the shift of the rail industry away from retail movement of single cars to repetitive bulk shipment multi-car loads. The carriers can't profitably deal with single-car movements of damage-prone freight.

On my way to and from the open house at the Huckleberry Railroad, announced on this board a few weeks ago, I saw freight-car wheelsets on highway trailers moving in both directions, presumably from CSXT or CNNA rip tracks. It's been a long time since I've seen a wheel car in use, but thanks to RYPN I've now seen UP 4-8-4's and 4-8-8-4's trucked overland.

Stay tuned for more news of highway moves of historic rail equipment.

The best pictures are when you see the flatbed trucks full of railroad wheels moving through on a piggyback flatcar. You can just smell the irony. For some reason that's annoyingly regular on BNSF.