NEB&W Self-Guided Tour of Troy & Green Island

Last Update: 2007-12-13

RiverSpark Visitor Center

Start at the RiverSpark Vistor Center, 251 River Street, just north of City Hall.

They have a great slide show on the overall history of the Mohawk-Hudson area. They also have a movie with footage shot by Albert Mallory c. 1957-'63 showing the railroading in and around the Troy depot, the razing of the station, and the final days of the Troy Union RR. There is a quarter-scale model of an interlocking plant is on display, and a display about the Gilbert Car Works.

Broadway & River

Step outside the Visitor Center

The final miles of the Mohawk describe a series of convoluted loops, ending at the giant falls at Cohoes. Early trappers and tradesman who plied the river by canoe generally chose to go overland ("portage") between Schenectady and Albany. The opening of the Erie Canal allowed the barges to enter the Hudson above Albany, across from Troy, and thus the businessmen of Albany grew alarmed at how this was allowing the Trojans to intercept and siphon off what had been their trade. They built a railroad to connect Albany and Schenectady, the first in New York State, followed by one from Schenectady to Saratoga, which would have taken the commerce coming down from the Champlain Valley, and normally have gone through Troy.

In retaliation, the Rensselaer & Saratoga was chartered in 1832, to connect Troy and Saratoga Springs.

The earliest railroads thought of themselves as merely a form of improved highway, a way to “pave” the street with iron rails. The steam locomotives were considered a form of mechanical horse, which would get hitched up to a number of stagecoach-like passenger cars to pull them. Thus the R&S laid their tracks in River Street, the main thoroughfare in the city at the time.

In 1809, the first bridge across the Hudson was built at Waterford, just above where Cohoes Falls. Minus the volume of water from the Mohawk, the river was so shallow that it wasn’t too navigable (but therefore easy to cross, or ford, hence the name of the village). There had been strong resistance to putting any bridge across the Hudson that would block river navigation below Waterford.

The R&S contracted with the owners of the Waterford bridge (it was a privately owned toll bridge) to arrange use of the bridge for their railroad, but the price insisted on was too high. The bridge owners felt they had a monopoly.

So instead, the R&S managed to get a charter allowing them to build their own bridge across to Green Island, even though it was required to have a swing span to allow sailboats and their masts to clear. (Apparently the burghers of A lbany were so busy gloating over their own railroad, they failed to notice the R&S’s charter amendment, as previously a bridge had been such a bone of contentment as to where it would go, Troy or Albany, that it failed to get built at all.)

The “Troy House” on River Street was used for the first depot, near the site of the present Hendrick Hudson. Horses pulled the coaches through the street and over to Green Island, where a locomotive was substituted.

The final segment of the line, including the long bridge over the Hudson, was opened on Oct. 6, 1835. At this time, a covered bridge was state-of-the-art engineering. Only a decade or so earlier had it been realized that giving an exterior wood sheathing protected the structural timber trusses from rotting. (The primitive paint at the time was not up to the task of providing much weatherproofing.)

First Train

In the 19th century, the Gilbert Car Co. began as a carriage works in Troy. In 1835, they built their first railroad cars for the new Rensselaer & Saratoga RR. A writer in 1836 described these coaches:

After a fire destroyed their plant, Gilbert moved to Green Island in 1853 (and their former Troy site was donated for the use of a new passenger station). Gilbert became world-renowned for their luxurious passenger cars under contract with the Wagner Palace Car Co. They also made numerous trolley cars. At its peak, the Gilbert Car Co. occupied almost 12 acres, but went out of business during the Panic of 1893.

Broadway & Sixth

Head south to State, make a left and head east to Sixth, left on Sixth and head north one block to Broadway at the foot of the Approach at the south end of the Best Western parking lot.

In 1842, the Troy & Schenectady came into town, also using the Green Island bridge. The Troy & Greenbush came up from the south in 1845. As the Troy & Boston were pushing their rails in from the north, the problem of congestion was too much.

In 1851, the Troy Union Railroad was chartered as a separate railroad, owned equally by the four lines. (The R&S became part of the Delaware & Hudson, the T&S and the T&G, part of the New York Central, and the T&B, the Boston & Maine, so the NYC wound up with owning half the TU.)

The Troy Union was moved as far east as possible, to the “outskirts”, but this was only over to Sixth Avenue, as at that point the terrain starts its up-swept climb. Gilbert donated their former site for the new depot. The double-track main headed straight east off the bridge and curved over to Sixth. The T&B came in directly from the north, and joined up with the other pair of mainlines just north of the depot. A second set of curves was added to form a “wye”, a track arrangement like the letter “Y” that allows an engine or train to be turned (like a three-point turn that an auto could make).

At the depot, the tracks fanned out to a total of 6.

The second depot was a new structure built entirely for this purpose. It included a massive trainshed that covered all 6 tracks. The station was a full block long, but the passing sidings were not much longer. However, they were suited for the short trains of the period. The new depot opened in 1854.

Because the new depot was that much farther from the bridge, the horses were done away with, and the locomotives used all the way across the bridge and into the station. Alas, not such a good idea. On May 10, 1862, a spark from a loco set the bridge on fire and a strong wind sent the embers into the city, burning much of it to the ground.

A new depot was erected on the same spot, in much the same style as had been built 8 years earlier. Most of Troy was quick to rebuild. The ornate Gurley building was constructed in about 7 months, opening in Dec. of ‘62. But as a result, Troy became a sea of Civil War architecture, including many “Norman” (a.k.a. Victorian Romanesque) buildings, with all the trim in brick, recessed arches and “machicolations” (icicle-like brick arches used in the cornice).

The third depot was used until 1900, when a radically new design was built to accommodate the ever-swelling rail traffic. The architect firm of Reed & Stem did away with the trainshed in favor of individual “umbrella” sheds, and used an underground pedestrian subway for passengers to get out to the trains without crossing the tracks.

The station was also built in a new style, Beaux Arts. Here the decoration was made of fired clay, but made to resemble the intricately carved marble of Greek and Roman times. The red brick was contrasted with white pillars and cornice and a copper green tile roof. The New York Central was so pleased with the Troy depot that they put Reed & Stem to work on their own Grand Central then being built in New York City.

By 1915, traffic would reach 135 passenger trains a day in Troy, not counting freights. There was half-hour service on the “belt-line”, the loop between Albany and Troy formed by the D&H on the west shore of the Hudson, and the New York Central on the east.

As traffic grew in volume, the Troy Union put into use a new device invented in England. This was a machine that interlocked the various levers used to switch tracks and to switch signals between go and stop. In a sense this was a mechanical computer that only allowed the levers to be moved in a certain sequence. Thus before a track switch could be thrown, the tower operator first had to set the appropriate signals to "stop", and couldn’t throw other signals to "go" until the correct route was set up through the maze of trackage.

An interlocking “plant” was set up in four separate towers. Towers 1 and 2 guarded the approaches to the station trackage, while Tower 3 was on Fifth Ave., guarding the west leg of the wye, and Tower 4 guarded the north leg. There was so little room because of all the buildings clustered around, that Towers 1 and 2 had to straddle the track. From each tower, a series of rodding and levers went out to the switches and signals, and the towermen had to have enough strength to move all this iron of a hundred or two hundred feet long.

The main line came up from the south by passing through a block long tunnel between Ferry and Congress Streets. The rowhouses around here soon were filled with women who entertained the railroad workers for a price. The trainmen would leave a lite red lantern hanging from in the window of the house they were in, so the crew-caller could locate them when their train was ready to depart. From the sheer number of red lanterns came the name “red light district.”

One of our alumni recalled that he was rather naive when he first came to school in 1942. As the train he was riding pulled into the depot, he noted all these women waving to him from the upper floors of the rowhouses, and he thought “How friendly Troy must be!”

It became so notorious that around 1880, a special branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association was set up in opposite the station, to provide a moral place for the workers to relax between trains. In the 20th century, the RR YMCA merged with the regular Troy one.

RPI was built on the side of the hill just up from the station. The campus would expanded up the hill and in 1904, an ornate stairway was built at the top of Broadway, called the Approach, as the main access into town was via the railroad station.

Both the New York Central and D&H could also use the Albany depot, but for the B&M, Troy was the western end of their passenger service - they didn’t cross the river. When the B&M cancelled their last train in 1958, the station was closed and a year later torn down.

However, the Rutland RR had official trackage rights over the B&M and the NYC to bring their daily milk train down to Chatham, NY. This was supposed to be a special fast train that had to get the milk to market while still fresh. It even used an old wood passenger car as a caboose, as the crew claimed a regular caboose rode too rough at these speeds. Now the Rutland had ended all passenger service in 1953, but continued to use this passenger car in this way just for the crew.

In ‘58, however, federal marketing eliminated Vermont from the New York milkshed, and from that point on, the Rutland milk train ceased to carry any milk. It mainly carried oil from the Port of Rensselaer in tank cars, which certainly didn’t need high-speed service and thus didn’t need the special caboose. The NYC brought these tank cars from the Port down to Chatham and handed them off to the Rutland, and they in turn came back past Rensselaer on their way north. (The route could have been shortened by changing the interchange to Rensselaer, but Federal red-tape made this near impossible.)

It was the abandonment of the Rutland in 1963 which allowed the removal of the last track through the city, as the industries in South Troy could be reached the track which crosses at Albany and still runs up from Rensselaer.

Federal & Grand

Go north on Sixth, and left toward the bridge, then right on Fifth behind the Senior Citizens Apartments.

This is the site of Tower 3. Tower 4 was over by the parking lot between the Senior Citizens building and the new firehouse.

Because of the curves in the wye toward the bridge, the building lots were often triangular or other odd shapes. On the north leg of the wye, most of the buildings are still standing and their edges line up in a curve. On Grand Street, there is one “flatiron” building left.

The covered bridge that burned in 1862 was replaced with another similar one. In 1884, it was replaced by a steel truss bridge. Like the previous bridges, it used a swing span near the Troy side to clear the narrow barges of the canal system. In 1913, the Mohawk was “canalized”, meaning that bigger barges pulled by tugboats replaced the mule-drawn canal boats. Between 1916 and 1924, the swing span was eliminated, and instead the main span was converted to a lift section by adding a tower at each end and a series of pulleys and counterweights, for wider clearance.

The bridge had originally been built with two tracks on the north side, and a two-lane roadway on the south. When the tracks were taken out in 1963, it became a four-lane road bridge and continued in use until 1977, when ice scoured away one of the piers, causing the bridge to fall. The new “silver” lift bridge was built in its place.

George Street, Green Island

Cross the lift bridge and make a right onto George Street in Green Island. Park on the right.

There were several lines that diverged after crossing the Green Island lift bridge. The original line of the Rensselaer & Saratoga swung immediately to the north to head up to Waterford by means of the large islands in the mouth of the Mohawk River. The R&S acquired the Albany Northern which ran up from Albany through Cohoes proper, and when they in turn were acquired by the D&H, this became their mainline. At Green Island, a connection was run due west from the lift bridge to the Albany Northern. The Troy & Schenectady RR (later taken over by the New York Central) also headed west.

The T&S had built its own depot and freight house diagonally opposite from the D&H's depot. The T&S depot was a two-story structure built in the Greek Revival style, with columns built into the corners and a frieze band under the eaves.

The first Green Island station built by the D&H was a Carpenter Gothic style one very similar to the one built at Howe's Cave. Around WWI, this building was moved a block away to make room for a new depot. This older depot became a private house and still stands today.

The second station was built in the Queen Anne style. The two dormers were topped with rather unique pinnacles. Both the D&H and the NYC depots were torn down in 1938, apparently in conjunction with the removal of the trolley system in Green Island and Troy. In addition to these stations, the D&H built a long freight station parallel to the Hudson River and United Traction had a waiting shelter there. In all, there were two freight stations and three passenger ones clustered around this one intersection, and a former one just around the corner.

Lafeyette & Paine

Head north on George and make the first left, onto Lafeyette. Then turn right onto Paine and park.

Eagle Foundry was built in 1851. By 1950, the building had been taken over by Manning Paper Co. In this building, used rope from the Port of Albany was untangled and unwound, so it could be used as a raw material in Manning's electrical papers. The building stood until the mid-1990's.

On the west side of wye, the D&H had its Bridge & Building Department, a cluster of small buildings with a pillar crane. The pillar crane still stands today. On the east side, the D&H had its signal department.

Center Street

Head north on Paine until you get to Manning. You have to make a right onto Clinton, go down (east) to George, make a left to head north, and make the next left onto Paine to the railroad crossing.

The Manning Paper Co. was organized in 1846 to make Manila paper from recycled hemp rope, for such uses as flour sacks, envelopes and later insulating electrical papers. Manning's grandson moved the firm over to Green Island in 1915, to the main section of the vacant Gilbert Car Works.

Another building of the Gilbert Works was taken over by a grocery warehouse in 1932, called the Public Service Market. As part of the Car Works, five tracks ran in the end, but as a grocery warehouse, all the openings, including the windows, were blocked up. This was not a traditional grocery store, but one of the earliest forms of supermarkets, with all sorts of merchandise from food to home appliances piled all over and under crude wooden tables. This was also one of the first "self-serve" grocery stores, where customers were able to go down the aisles and select items at their leisure, carrying them in a wicker basket to a grocery checker in the center of the store.

While electric lights had been around from the last century, such a setting must have seemed very dark. It took the invention of the fluorescent lamp a few years later, in 1938, to make practical our modern windowless supermarkets, shopping malls, and even industries.

Despite this venture starting in the depths of the Depression, it prospered. A year later another store was opened in Schenectady, NY near Central Park, and hence called Central Markets. Additional stores were opened throughout the Capital District area. In 1973, Central Markets was renamed Price Chopper, with stores from Pennsylvania into New England.

What had been a lumber storage area across the tracks from Gilbert became Standard Railway Signal around 1900. This was one of the first companies in America to make interlocking plants. Soon afterwards they merged with a Rochester firm, General Railway Signalling, known as GRS, one of the major signalling companies. After they closed their Green Island facility, a new factory was built on the site, Sweet & Doyle, then Simmons, now Green Island homes.

Tibbits & Paine

Head north on Paine until it runs into Tibbits. Turn right and park.

The Rensselaer & Saratoga started building their main repair shops here in 1871, where all the locomotives, etc. were sent for repairs. In 1911, the D&H consolidated their locomotive repairs in their yard behind the Watervliet Arsenal. (It was called Colonie Shops, because apparently the railroad was able to get the Colonie town limit extended down to this area for tax purposes.)

In the 20th century, the Green Island shops specialized in some experimental freight car designs which made the national trade publications.

Model Railroad

Head up Rt. 7 (Hoosic Street) and turn right onto Burdett (the next traffic light after 15th Street). Go on Burdett to the last parking lot. The building has a railroad sign on the south end.

On the layout, you will see a model of the fourth station, the check-to-jowl nature of the city structures, the old Green Island lift bridge, the stations clustered around George Street in Green Island, and the Manning Paper/Central Markets complex.