Posts Tagged ‘Queens Blvd.’
gangrenous glare
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Just a short one today, as your humble narrator has recently been laid low by some unknown virus for the last week, and frankly- all I can manage in this state of epidemic weakness and fatigue is another of the “now and then” posts.
Doubt exists in my mind as to the exact location of the shot below, but there were several improvements made to the elevated line on Queens Blvd. over the years, some of which were due to the lengthening of the platforms to accommodate IND as well as IRT to facilitate system wide access to the World’s Fair at what is now Flushing Meadow Corona Park.
– photo courtesy google books, from: Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920: The Borough of Homes and Industry
This very well might be the 46th street station in Sunnyside… but I’ll also point out that the Chrysler Building is missing as well.
antique state
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post gets involved with a serious bit of pondering, and will ask a naive question that I’m sure somebody else has thought of and discovered some insurmountable barrier to it’s feasibility.. Something I’ve always wondered about, even as a young but already humble narrator back during the fabled 1970’s…
Why don’t MTA trains ever carry commercial freight?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The fabled “money train”, garbage trains, and track work flatbed cars prove that you can indeed run freight through the light rail system. Loading, and unloading, cargo is accomplished in a timely fashion. The tracks are generally not “tied up” for long by these specialty trains, nor are they chewed up by doing this kind of duty anymore than they would be during rush hour service when the cars are packed to the gills.
I’m not talking rush hour, but middle of the night sort of bulk deliveries, using a miniature form of the ocean going steel shipping container that is deployed on a specialized (non passenger car) to facilitate speedy cargo handling. How many trucks would that take off the road, and what would decoupling the local food economy from the price of gasoline do for New York City?
The subway is already a sort of distributed node network, which carries a cargo of irregularly shaped meat products from one side of the city to the other, why not just add a second class of cargo and a specialized cargo car. The beautiful part of the cargo containerization concept is that it reduces shipping down to a simple calculation of weight and measure multiplied by distance. A ton of cargo is a ton of cargo, doesn’t matter if it’s engine blocks or rice krispies, as long as it fits in a cargo container it costs the same.
Specify a small shipping container size, make it self powered and wheeled and set it to robotically roll off onto the platform where it’s programmed to and await pickup. Getting it to the sidewalk can be accomplished a half dozen different ways, and I’m not talking system wide either. Load on in Queens or the Bronx, and roll off in Manhattan- where all the trucks are coming from and going to anyway.
Why not?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As long as the cargo is within the bulk limit of what the tracks and undercarriages are designed to do, and given the proximity to truck depot and railhead alike that so many of the outlying MTA depots enjoy, wouldn’t there be some efficacy to using the subways to move commercial goods around the city? I’m not talking bricks here, but food and dry goods delivered to where the population is densest.
Sure the setup process would be expensive, but amortizing the cost out over a generation or two can’t be that painful. Moving a case of bread or cinnamon buns from a bakery in Long Island City to a supermarket in Harlem using an already electrified third rail and a non passenger subway car which has to be cheaper than using a truck. It would certainly be better for the environment, and probably put a lot of people to work over the course of time.
It would add a new revenue stream to the MTA, and guarantee that items manufactured or cooked or just plain created within New York City were immediately advantaged over any competitors from out of town.
Just asking.
cherished in fancy
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A topic that isn’t terribly popular to discuss at cocktail parties pertains to the Department of Sanitation of New York, as it reminds the “swells” that there’s always a bill to pay. Perhaps my fascinations with the DEP and the wastewater systems of the megalopolis have just adjusted my perception, but the flow of refuse in, around, and out of the City just might be one of the most important strategic issues of our day. I had intended this short post to focus in on the actual truck pictured above, and discuss statistical information about horsepower, load, and fuel consumption- however- I can find absolutely nothing on the subject publicly available.
Odd. DSNY is all about numbers.
There is a dearth of propaganda about an experiment with hybrid electric diesel models assigned to actual routes, but it will take a long time to replace all the big white trucks.
Extant esoterica begins this second annum of this, your Newtown Pentacle…
from nyc.gov
2,196 Collection Trucks
DSNY Collection and E-Z Pak trucks collect 12,000 tons (2,000 pounds = 1 ton) of refuse and recycling each day. Collection trucks service curbside refuse and recycling along with basket collection and can hold up to 12 tons of refuse each. EZ-Pak trucks collect refuse that is stored in containers.
The Newtown Pentacle 