(The following article by Greg Clary was posted on the White Plains Journal News website on June 16.)
PEARL RIVER, N.Y. — A rather odd-looking train worked its way up the Pascack Valley Line yesterday, made even odder by the fact that it took a day and a half to get from Pearl River to just south of Nanuet.
But it’s not that easy to make good time when you’re pulling up old railroad ties and putting in new ones as you go.
By next week, NJ Transit workers expect to finish a two-month project to replace more than 18,000 railroad ties on the Pascack Valley train line between the Secaucus Transfer Junction and Spring Valley.
“We’ll be out of here by June 23,” project supervisor Bill Tidd said. “Barring natural disasters, we should make it. If we don’t, my boss won’t be happy.”
The $3.7 million construction job is part of routine maintenance the railroad does throughout its network every few years.
After the 50 crew members finish the 21-mile stretch that ends in Rockland, they will head to Princeton, N.J., and then to Otisville, N.Y.
The crew and the machines have been at work since April and are nearing the end of this run.
While they’ve been working, they’ve drawn quite a crowd, as they usually do.
With more than a dozen machines, each self-propelled and with specific tasks, the vehicles resemble a outdoor factory assembly line more than a train.
A spike-pulling machine moves ahead of the rest, finding pre-marked ties to loosen and staying far away from the rest of the group so it doesn’t slow progress .
Next comes the biggest machine, which pulls out railroad ties and sets them on the side of the track’s right-of-way, ahead of the rest of the machines that follow closely behind.
At a rate of 600-700 ties a day, traveling about an eighth of a mile per hour, the assembly line removes the wood pieces, digs new holes and replaces the ties without affecting the steel rails that carry the line’s commuter trains.
Eight-year-old Jonathan Badillo of Chestnut Ridge watched the work as if he were in a trance.
“We’ve been here a lot,” said his grandmother, Pearl River resident Lucille Casavis. “He loves it. He’s learning so much.”
From his grandmother’s window, Jonathan is used to seeing trains with cars connected one to another — and without the ability to rip up railroad ties as they go, like this one can.
“Are those the spikes that hold it down?” he asked a fellow onlooker. “That’s a big machine.”
The track work is being done between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., to allow regular commuter schedules to be maintained.
In the afternoon, the crews move the machines off the main tracks and park south of the Pearl River station, leaving the 3:57 out of Hoboken unaffected.
Since the work began, the railroad has had to provide bus service at the Rutherford Station in New Jersey for riders on the 1:55 train from Hoboken to Pearl River, Nanuet and Spring Valley.
Rail officials said there were about 3,200 ties to a mile, though not all have to be replaced.