Another Behemoth

I took that picture from a train approaching Penn Station from the north, as we approached the Hell Gate Bridge from the Bronx side. The fact that the approach to a train station in Manhattan is over a bridge connecting the Bronx and Queens takes a little explanation…

New York City is, more or less, an archipelago. It consists of the entirety of Manhattan and Staten Islands, the west end of Long Island (Brooklyn and Queens), a bunch of small Islands (Roosevelt, Governors, Rikers, North and South Brother, etc.) and one chunk of mainland (the Bronx). The Hudson River is quite wide; the East River is wide and has fast currents that reverse direction with each change of the tides. In short, for nineteenth-century railroad builders, it was a lot easier to put the terminals for railroad coming from the east on the east side of the East River, put terminals coming from the west on the west side of the Hudson, and use ferries to get people to Manhattan. Only the New York Central Railroad had a Manhattan terminal (Grand Central) because the route came in from the north, over the relatives;y small Harlem River.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad constructed Penn Station in Manhattan, the main goal was to get a direct line into New York. It also allowed for through trains between “north” (i.e., Boston, to the northeast) and “south” (Philadelphia to the southwest and Washington to the south-southwest). There was no practical way to run trains north and east from Penn Station, as that would require tunneling through all of Midtown and the Upper East Side, but part of the huge project was the PRR’s purchase of the Long Island Railroad, a commuter line with no long-haul trains and relatively little freight. That purchase meant that instead of commenting Penn Station to the Bronx, some seven miles away, the designers and builders could create two smaller connections, from Penn Station east to Queens, and from Queens to the Bronx, using LIRR rights of way in between. The new construction, from the east river tunnels to the connection to existing New Haven Railroad tracks in the Bronx, was called the New York Connecting Railroad, and its centerpiece was the huge bridge over Hell Gate, the right-angle turn in the East River where the Harlem River joins it.

Here’s a more professional photo of the bridge as a whole, taken in 1991 when there was only one big high-rise on the Queens side of the river, way off in the distance:

Here’s a close up of a connection near the Queens abutment:

That’s the main upper chord of the double arch running diagonally across the photo, a tiny bit of the upper-upper bracing chord at the upper right corner, some of the bracing between them, and, vertical in the center, one of the hangers that supports the deck off the arch. When your hangers are big I-beam sections, you’ve got heavy loads.

One oddity about the bridge: the upper-upper chord is for local stiffening only. The ends of that curve are in mind air, masked by the concrete towers at each end. The main (lower) upper chord is the actual arch. In any case, in a city full of slender and elegant suspension bridges, the Hell Gate stands out for its weight and for the extreme weight it was designed to carry: four fully loaded coal trains at once or, worse, two such trains on one side of the deck, creating a big overall torsion.