Update on this site north of Albany, NY, a joint yard of the Delaware & Hudson and Boston & Maine. I think only one RR shop building is still there, but the in-ground pollution remains:

Grant gives new hope to polluted rail yard
State awards $410,350 to study site and ready it for redevelopment

By KENNETH C. CROWE II, Staff writer
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First published: Saturday, February 25, 2006

MECHANICVILLE -- After 17 years working on the railroad, Mayor Anthony Sylvester can tell you how some of the worst pollution occurred in the old rail yard. It came from fuel spilling over as the diesel engines were refueled, he said.
Now, the city has a $410,350 state grant to study the contamination of the 20-acre rail yard and establish a plan on how to clean it.

"This will expand the tax base and create new jobs," Sylvester said Friday after the grant from the state's Environmental Restoration Program was announced at City Hall.

The city pursued the grant as part of a plan to transform the area into a light industrial park. The city purchased the site in 1996 from Guilford Transportation.

The grant to Mechanicville was one of seven announced by Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Denise M. Sheehan at an afternoon news conference.

"Today's grants are the first step toward redevelopment of these sites from abandoned and underutilized parcels to clean properties where new business and our environment can thrive," Sheehan said.

Restoring the Mechanicville site, where trains were fueled and repaired, will allow undeveloped areas to be preserved by returning polluted industrial sites to active use, Sheehan said.

The city had tried for several years before finally winning the grant through the 1996 Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act.

"We've been working on this for a long time. This is going to be good for the city," said former Mayor Thomas Higgins.

The site is on the city's west side, just south of Route 67. The city Public Works Department already uses part of the property. But most of the site is overgrown with vegetation and is empty.

Saratoga County Board of Supervisors Chairman Harry Gutheil, R-Moreau, said the light industrial park could be home to businesses that are expected to open when the computer chip factories in the proposed Luther Forest Technology Campus are developed.

Bob,

A handful of buildings from the B&M shops still stand, one replete with two versions of the B&M rectangle logo painted on them. The concrete flooring of the old roundhouse still radiates in the weeds over there, but the D&H wood boxcar turned-inside-out-cum-sandhouse is gone.

On the D&H side the roundhouse remains came down in the 1990's.

There is an active effort to preserve XO tower in town, while the adjacent depot awaits some with TLC to spare.

Hard to beleive when I look at the slides of my first trip to Mickeyville in 1976 that I shot PAs on the Adriondack, Alcos galore at the D&H roundhouse, and maroon GP-7s and Lehigh Valley yellow jackets on the B&M side.

Of course, I should mention I was 8 years old and just shooting all the mundae trains of the day, it wasn't till I found the slides 20 years later that I went "woah!"

Rob