The last article in the Scientific American “New York” issue is somewhat different than the others. The others may have included some speculation that did not come true, but were all based on infrastructure that was in construction or in existence at the time of publication. “Freight Distribution by Subway” was about a proposal to build a series of freight rail lines in northern New Jersey, in New York City, and in New York State north of the city to better handle freight traffic. The basic idea was to have (a) direct rail connections all of the many railroads converging on New York, (b) have a route for through freight (between, for example, New England and the Midwest) to run through New York without getting caught in the local traffic, and (c) to make it easier to get rail freight (more heavily concentrated on the west side of the harbor and Hudson River) to and from ships (more heavily concentrated on the east side of the harbor and river).
The plan shown here, and variations on it through the 1910s and 20s, were mostly the work of William Wilgus, the engineer behind the Grand Central electrification and new terminal. Ultimately they all failed, in large part because the railroads did not trust one another, the bigger railroads saw no need to engage in joint efforts that helped smaller railroads, and the various governments involved didn’t trust any of the railroads. One of the reasons the Port Authority was created in the 1920s was to try to bring some plan like this to life. The cross-harbor freight tunnel that would have been the centerpiece of any of those schemes was never built.
Ultimately, de-industrialization, the movement of a lot of shipping to other harbors, and the movement of much of New York harbor’s shipping to Newark made the entire issue moot. Had any of Wilgus’s plans been built, or even the watered-down early Port Authority plan, then movement of freight away from the NYC piers would likely have been slowed, but the nation-wide economic changes would still have governed much of what happened. On the other hand, look at that incredibly cool freight subway by the piers.
