Metro North Railroad's Hudson Line is a heavy duty passenger railroad seeing upwards of 170 trains polish the steel on the four main tracks every weekday. Electric MUs operate as far as Croton-Harmon and diesel powered trains continue all the way to Poughkeepsie, 73 miles north of Grand Central Terminal. In addition another 22 Amtrak trains pass to and from points as far flung as Burlington, VT, Montreal and Toronto in Canada, and Chicago.
However, what this line doesn't have much of is freight. In days of old countless New York Central hot shot manifests, reefer blocks, and trail vans headed down to the massive yards on the West Side of Manhattan, while locals peddled cars to dozens of industries in each of the river towns lining the east bank of the Hudson. But time moves on and the industries have been replaced with parks and condos and the west side yards have sprouted massive high rises. New York City is still and always will be a massive freight market, and rail is still hugely important to it, but now virtually all of the business travels up and down the west side of the river to and from the yards, warehouses, docks, and intermodal terminals of North Jersey.
One lone freight train keeps the tradition alive plying the line nightly to and from Selkirk Yard and Oak Point Yard in the Bronx, which ironically enough, was historically not a NYC facility but rather harkens back to the erstwhile New Haven. The northbound train handles massive amounts of municipal solid waste in containers while the southbound brings interchange traffic for the New York and Atlantic Railroad on Long Island, a smattering of refrigerator cars for the Hunts Point market, and a few other random cars for the last remaining carload customers in New York City proper.
Of course, unless there is a service interruption or unusual delay, the train runs completely under the cover of darkness during the hours passenger traffic is much lighter. Without supplementary lighting it is hard to photograph, but since I was staying just a few blocks away I figured I'd walk down to the platform and see what I could manage with ambient light. This is is about it and wouldn't be half bad if only the platform canopy was higher!
Northbound CSXT train M701 hustles north on Main 2 as seen from the inbound platform at Irvington station at MP 22.7 as measured from Grand Central Terminl on modern day Metro North's Hudson Line, the former New York Central Railroad water level route which traces its history here back to 1849. The pair of elderly AC4400CWs are regulars on this train account they are equipped with ACSES and have notched plows cleared for operation in third rail territory like this. Take note of the loaded centerbeam on the head pin. I would venture to guess this is for Tulnoy Lumber up in Chelsea which is the last carload customer on the entire line and has a trailing point northbound switch hence it takes a ride south on M702 then gets added back to this train to be spotted on the northbound trip.
Village of Irvington
Town of Greenburgh, New York
Thursday July 13, 2026
