I'VE HEARD OF THIS BRIDGE FOR YEARS BUT NEVER KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS! FROM TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES: Tilting at Windmills, Only This One's a Bridge July 1, 2002 By KIRK JOHNSON POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - About a decade ago, Bill Sepe uncorked a doozy of an idea. The old Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge - an engineering marvel in 1888 but a delinquent eyesore ever since a spectacular fire closed it in 1974 - should be transformed, he said, into a pedestrian skyway over the Hudson River. The old rail bed, wrapped in its Victorian-era lattice of steel, 200 feet above the water, would get a second life, he and others said, as strollers and bikers thrilled to the view and the history. Central to the walkway plan was its seize-the-day enthusiasm. The bridge's owner at that time, in the early 1990's, had not paid taxes for years, and that made it an abandoned structure, according to Mr. Sepe, then a self-employed handyman. He began leading volunteer crews out on the rail bed to see what could be salvaged. Local politicians and business leaders, envisioning hordes of weekenders with bulging wallets, cheered the effort on. "He had that dream, and he infected people with it," said Robert Shepard, town supervisor in Lloyd, N.Y., on the bridge's western side. "I believed in it." Today Mr. Sepe (rhymes with peppy) is still living the dream, but it is an increasingly lonely one. The old bridge sits silent behind a chain-link fence, locked in legal limbo. Many of the volunteers have drifted away. Some local officials have begun worrying that pieces of rusting steel, unpainted for three decades, could fall into the river. Developers of a network of hiking trails being built on old rail lines were planning a link to the bridge, but they have plotted out an alternate route. Mr. Sepe said he blamed narrow-minded politics for the impasse. Other people, including even some of his ardent admirers, said the problem was that the bridge's fortunes became bound up too much with the vision, and the foibles, of Mr. Sepe himself. Although the dream is not dead, people on both sides of the river agree that what eventually happens will depend less on rusting rivets than on the temperament and tactics of the man who would be the walkway king. "The bridge is his life," said Dick Coller, a retired electrical engineer who has worked closely with Mr. Sepe for years and once led tourists out on the bridge to the viewing platform that the volunteers helped build about 1,200 feet from the western side. "But he wants to do it his way." Town officials in Lloyd are more blunt. "The man is an idiot," said David L. Butler, supervisor of the Building Department and its chief code enforcement officer. He and other town officials say they have spent $30,000 in legal fees just for an unsuccessful effort to force Mr. Sepe's group, Walkway Over the Hudson, to comply with building and zoning regulations for the structures that were built within town boundaries. "If anybody else was running that organization, there would have been people walking on that bridge three years ago," Mr. Butler said. Mr. Sepe, now 54, said there was no doubt that the walkway consumed him and that he made some mistakes. Bridge affairs took over his home - filling up his living room, then his dining room and his garage with files, posters and donated office equipment. It cost him his handyman business, he said, because customers objected to his running off for meetings. He has since taken jobs serving legal papers, driving a bus and most recently operating a tractor at a gravel mine in Rhinebeck three days a week, all to accommodate his bridge duties. The project was bad for his health, he said, as he gained weight from the stress. But he said he believed, whatever the cost and however sour things have turned out, that the original vision was right. He insisted almost from the beginning, for example, that building the walkway would be a community affair - a self-financed, volunteer effort that would not take a dime of government money. The government, Mr. Sepe preached, always takes control of what it pays for; conversely, any community that creates something through sweat and dedication will value it more, he said. That idealistic view got hundreds of people involved in the early days, but later it came to seem quixotic, some volunteers said, as the dimensions of the project became clearer. Mr. Sepe said he thought a walkway could be built for $2 million; some experts have said it could cost $30 million just to paint the bridge. Mr. Sepe's freewheeling philosophy also ran afoul of local zoning laws after his group gained legal title to the bridge in the late 1990's. He refused to post a $1,600 escrow payment for an engineering inspection, saying the bill was padded. Then, in the middle of the litigation, in 2000, a volunteer was seriously injured in an electrical accident while working on the bridge, and an angry State Supreme Court Justice said he'd had enough. The judge slapped a permanent injunction on Walkway Over the Hudson, barring any tours or repairs. Mr. Sepe appealed the injunction in May. Standing on the unfinished walkway, Mr. Sepe said that if he lost the appeal, a civil disobedience campaign could be the next step. He might simply go back to work on the bridge anyway - court injunction be hanged - along with any volunteers who care to follow him. "I won't be bullied," he said. Mr. Sepe said he believed that town officials in Lloyd had a political agenda behind their lawsuits and court orders. "To me, this is a right everybody has - not to be harassed to take public money," he said. "Politicians would take money from soup kitchens. We've got a soup kitchen right here in Poughkeepsie that doesn't get adequate funding, and yet they would put money into this bridge." Town officials in Lloyd said taking the walkway group to court was simply a last resort. "We think it's a great use for the bridge and have always been in favor of it, but we also have a responsibility to the general public to protect life, safety and welfare," said Mr. Butler, the code enforcement officer. Many people in this part of the Hudson Valley, about 90 miles north of New York City, can claim an emotional ownership of the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge. For some, it stands for the days when Poughkeepsie was on every freight-hauler's map, linking New England and the Midwest. For others, it's a poignant symbol of the economic hard knocks that had begun even before the fire, as the heavy industries that once sent their freight clattering across the river faded away. It was the first bridge across the Hudson south of Albany, and for a time - if its approach system is counted - was also the longest in the world, at 6,768 feet. Judy Moran, a retired elementary school teacher, said the bridge was a link to her childhood and to her father, who worked as a switchman on the Poughkeepsie side. She was a member of Mr. Sepe's group and led walkway tours in the mid-1990's, before dropping out about three years ago in a disagreement with him over the issue of public financing. Mr. Shepard, the town supervisor in Lloyd, was a volunteer firefighter on May 8, 1974, when the blaze that closed the bridge broke out. It was a scary night, he said. Working high over the river, the fire crews had to tear out the oil-soaked railroad ties, which had been ignited by sparks from a train, and each tie that was removed left less for the firefighters to stand on as they worked. Several members of the walkway group say that part of the story of the stalled walkway comes down to the question of who will, in the end, be the bridge's master. "Bill just doesn't want to lose control of it," said one person in the group who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, since he wants to be part of the project, which he believes will eventually resume. Mr. Sepe agreed that perhaps control was an issue, but he said the project was not about him. "I'm willing to give up control if somebody shows the commitment and wants to do it," he said. "My fear that if we give up, we'll lose the whole thing, that it'll be erased, it'll be something completely different than what we wanted. I want it to be something we did ourselves, something that we did." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/nyregion/01BRID.html?ex=1026540864&ei=1&en=cac9d3226ea39411 --------------------------------- Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
Ok, Johnny, refresh my rapidly failing memory of that area. Would this be the New Haven crossover to the West Shore bridge?
Fitz, The bridge was part of the New Haven connection from Danbury, CT to Maybrook, NY. where it interchanged with the Lehigh & New England(?). The double-tracked line crossed into New York State from Connecticut near Dykemans, NY, a little north of Brewster North. It paralleled the NYC Harlem Division northward until Towners where it bridged the Harlem. It continued wandering north-westward until it bridged the Hudson Division and Hudson River at Poughkeepsie on its way to Maybrook. The tracks now terminate near Poughkeepsie at an interchange with Metro-North Hudson Line. I believe that Metro-North ran an inspection train over that line a while back with the aim of establishing commuter service through that area. As I remember, the train ran out of GCT, up through Connecticut to Danbury, over to Poughkeepsie, then back to GCT. Apparently nothing came of that trip. I read that Metro-North did run at least one excursion train over (a portion of?) that line a while back. Maybe Peirce could fill us in? I was fortunate to be flying out of Stormville, NY with my brother in the late 40's, when we saw a westbound NH freight behind some F's. We followed it almost all the way to Poughkeepsie before we figured we better hightail it back to our authorized airspace! [ 02 July 2002, 20:44: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
Maybe I'm thinking of something else, but I thought that the bridge was part of the Boston and Albany. Wasn't it called the "cutoff-something"?
John, you're thinking of the Castleton Cutoff, completed in 1925 by the NYC. The Cutoff allowed the NYC and B&A to directly access the big yard south of Schenectady (forget its name ), bypassing the Rensselaer/Albany congestion. The Cutoff crosses the River at Castleton-on-Hudson, about 10 miles south of Rensselaer, and is still in use by CSX today. [ 03 July 2002, 01:25: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
Hank, that'd be Selkirk Yard, and I thought of that as well, but it's way too far north of Poughkeepsie to qualify. You are right, the connection is for the New Haven. We may be getting old and forgetting what we did yesterday, but can remember that REALLY old stuff.
Hank - It was the Lehigh and Hudson River and became a part of Conrail. The bridge fire was the beginning of the end for the L&HR. The bridge at Poughkeepsie was NY, NH & H. The bridge at Castleton was B&A (NYC) and just east of the bridge there is a connection to the Hudson line of NYC (now CSX). Selkirk yard was known as A E Perlman Yard before CSX. The line south of Selkirk is the old West Shore RR (then NYC and now CSX) to NJ.
Thanks for all the info, Guys. CSX and NS have been talking about access to southern New England since the Conrail split. The Poughkeepsie bridge would provide that access if enough traffic could be forecast to cover the cost of rebuilding. Yeh, I call it my "write-only" memory. [ 03 July 2002, 14:17: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
Question for Hank - What is the name of the passenger cutoff from Rensselaer station to the B&A? During the PennCentral period this was removed and the Boston section of the Lake Shore ran down the Hudson line to the connection from the Castleton Bridge and then backed up the hill onto the bridge to go east. Eventually Amtrak got the funding to put the connection back in service. PC installed cTc on the connection from the Hudson line to the line off the Castleton bridge to help speed up the reverse move. With deals like this it is no wonder Amtrak is in debt.
Ouch, I wish you hadn't asked. I, Corey Lynch, and a few others talked about the Troy, Rensselaer, Albany bridge(s) a year or so ago .... darned if I remember any details now. I even rode across the Troy/Albany connection a few times in the early 50's on Rutland thru-cars to GCT! I'll take a look in the NYC TrainBoard archives, maybe I'll see our topic ... ? [ 03 July 2002, 20:59: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
Gil, I found two posts in the NYC Forum about the bridges in the Tri-City area ..... Harron's post Big Als' post Hope these help. [ 03 July 2002, 21:40: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
You guys have given me great info here on this trestle! But........I feel sorry for the poor guy who tried to fix the darn thing up. He just wasn't the right person I guess. Good idea though. Even a Rails to Trails. (Sigh. How about Trails to Rails instead!!!!) It's a shame to have had it rot for all this time without anyone else trying to turn it into something other than an eyesore. Now, so many years after the fire, who has the money to preserve it...........? After the fire, I guess it was just an era of abandonment and damn those trains. Now, a question for the experts in TB. If the money were found to completely renovate it, what pros or cons would it bring about?
