Walkway Over the Hudson State Park
1,692 views · Published 21 January 2011 · 2:59 · Indexed 8 November 2026
Channel: John Horvath · 2011 · Travel & Events
00:00 On the deck. 00:17 Push the button before leaping. 00:34 Mid Hudson Highway Bridge. Loop trail over both bridges. The Mid Hudson path is outside the suspenders. Sensation is like walking on air. Passing truck or bus stretches the suspenders dropping the walkway. The walkway bounces back. Suspender stretching and compression thrills un-motorized traffic over this bridge. 01:22 Early morning week day. Deck is crowded on week ends. 01:53 Amtrak at the Poughkeepsie RR Station. The classy NYC Poughkeepsie station is out of site on the left. Poughkeepsie is the last stop for Metro North commuter trains out of Grand Central. 02:20 Riverside Church has the Flying Buttress. Here is the Poughkeepsie RR Bridge flying Cantilever-Truss. 02:36 Bessemer Mild Steel is a super cooled liquid. The Poughkeepsie RR Bridge of tomorrow. I lived at the Poughkeepsie end of this bridge during its low life period. The blackberries growing out of roadbed were incredible. Challenges like thorns, tangles of gas pipe installed to throw switches at a switch tower reduced to a concrete pad, made berries taste better. Had a long lunch hour the day the bridge burned. Could not use NYS 9 back to work because of burning debris falling on the road. Great to see this great bridge back in use. ConRail chose not to repair the bridge after the fire. Reasoning was that more route miles generated by sending traffic north to Albany and South again to southern New England would generate more route mile revenue. More revenue was generated -- for trucks. More sleaze about the low life years of the Poughkeepsie RR bridge is in the Wikipedia article. None of the supposed regulating authorities corrected ConRail. The ROW into Harlem Valley was used to ease the grade and curves of NYS 55 into the valley. Around 1995, the RR overpass in Arlington was removed to aide the flow of the increased truck traffic. Poughkeepsie RR Bridge was the only profitable part of the New Haven system, the piece that kept New Haven RR solvent. The beautiful Hell Gate complex of Astoria, Queens, NYC, does not produce profit. Design by MacDonald and Paine. Build by Union Bridge Co. Opens, 1889. Double track cantilever and truss design. Strengthened by Ralph Modjeski, of Modjeski and Masters in 1912. Gantlet track 1917. Single track 1959. Fire 1974. Walkway opens Oct 2009 with Singer Pete Seeger. 415,000 visitors the remaining 3 months of 2009, more than twice the planned number. Crowd management issues May 2010.
