A few pictures from a beautiful day Saturday.
Highland side of the river.
My sweetheart. The walk is uphill from Poughkeepsie, NY to Highland. A lot of people on a sunny day.
Poughkeepsie NY Amtrak station
From a couple of years back. A rain soaked Monday.
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Mike:
It's hard to tell from the photos looking across the bridge, but has it been narrowed since it was converted to a hike/bike trail? I have a book on the New Haven and it indicates the bridge was originally two tracks when built by the Central New England and then later changed to a gauntlet.
This doesn't look anywhere near wide enough for a gauntlet let alone two tracks.
Curt
You can see the original structural steel from the walkway. So I venture a guess it is smaller than the two track bridge. I had a great time riding the bridge with my bike on that rainy Monday morning a couple of years ago. There were so many people on the bridge Saturday It would have been difficult. It can be very windy.
Poughkeepsie side
Noted this trip: The suicide hot line signs had been removed. This bridge is lighted with LED fixtures along the South railing. I learned a lot more about a very interesting River, the Hudson.
Mike:
It's hard to tell from the photos looking across the bridge, but has it been narrowed since it was converted to a hike/bike trail? I have a book on the New Haven and it indicates the bridge was originally two tracks when built by the Central New England and then later changed to a gauntlet.
This doesn't look anywhere near wide enough for a gauntlet let alone two tracks.
Curt
I am going to throw down the gauntlet and say it was actually a gantlet track.
Dennis:
About a year or so ago, there was a discussion on the Real Trains Forum about the proper spelling of this. I had always used gantlet myself, but a couple of the old heads on the Real Trains Forum advised that it should be gauntlet.
Since I didn't want to be corrected again (famous last words!), I used gauntlet. To be safe, in the future I'm going to call it "that thingy where two tracks kind of come down into one over a short stretch of railroad and then separate without ever having actually become one". 
Curt
Curt
I too was corrected that is was "gantlet" not "gauntlet."
So it's a caboose or it's a van or it's a waycar...
Why a gantlet?? My guess. It allowed for two routes across the river diverged on the Highland side with all switches still in Poughkeepsie controlled by the Washington street tower. There is interconnecting linkage still in the weeds near the Poughkeepsie parking area. How far could you control a switch via mechanical connection???? These rods are an easy 1/4 mile from Washington Street.
Mike:
The book I mentioned previously says the reason for the gantlet/gauntlet track was heavier locomotives that came into service a number of years after the bridge had been built. I'd guess the idea was to center the weight on the bridge structure.
Not sure how far a rod interlocking would extend. Any familiarity I have with interlocking plants is limited to the PRR electro-mechanical plants I saw in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up. With those, you could remotely control an interlocking miles distant from the tower.
Curt
I'm not sure if the current bridge surface is narrower than when the railroad was running on it. The New Haven Railroad moved the track arrangement to overlapping in the 1920's I read to center the weight on the bridge because of the increased weight the locomotives it was getting then.
A point of information, the railroad station in the view looking down from the bridge is owned by the New York MTA and is operated by The Metro-North Railroad. Amtrak is a tenant at this station.
Ed G. (Along The New Haven Line of Metro-North and Amtrak, the busiest railroad line
in the U.S.A.)
Great pics, Mike!
{Peter
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