Main Line/Port Jervis Line To Port Jervis

The Main Line tracks — the reason Secaucus Junction is a junction — travel below the Northeast Corridor tracks there, where one switches to the Main Line out to Port Jervis:

The Moodna Viaduct trestle bridge is 3200 feet long and rises 193 feet above the valley below, making it the second-highest, second-longest trestle bridge east of the Mississippi River (second, that is, to the Poughkeepsie Bridge, otherwise known as the Walkway Over the Hudson):

Port Jervis:

I’m fuzzy when it comes to railroad minutiae but it says the Port Jervis line was once the Erie Railroad, and the Erie Limited was a fairly big time passenger route running from Hudson County across from Manhattan to Chicago. This charming old station served as the passenger stop for Port Jervis (the current Metro-North station is much more modest):

The Erie Hotel and Restaurant:

We happened upon this wonderful little caboose in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store:

The picturesque Laurel Grove Cemetery sits on a finger of land between the Delaware and Neversink Rivers:

At the tip of the peninsula is the Tri-States Monument, which is the exact spot where the borders of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania intersect:

A nearby stele “witnesses” the marker and provides details . . .

The 115-foot-long Erie Turntable dates to 1927 and was part of the railyard at Port Jervis; turntables are used to turn locomotives around where there is not a lot of space for a turnaround:

We visited in 2022, just before the Port Jervis Transportation History Center was to have opened. Sadly, it seems that the city of Port Jervis is evicting the organization that runs the center and the historic trains at the site are going to be moved (the fate of the historic turntable itself is unclear) . . .

Finally, back through New Jersey on the journey back home:

Hudson Valley Updates

Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park:

On Market Street in Rhinebeck, this . . .

. . . is now this:

We visited Dia Beacon back in September 2021. I thought I already had pictures of Dia, having visited there sometime in the aughts, so I let our then-seven-year-old have fun with my phone. He ended up spamming like 200-plus images. I straightened the orientation but for the most part otherwise mostly preserved the compositions (I did this one other time at the Natural History Museum back in 2016.)

Some images looked just like this:

Or this:

And they were all portrait orientation, lol, so it *looked* like the perspective of a seven-year-old, with everything at the top half of the frame:

But sometimes that top-half composition looked surprisingly, I don’t know, composed:

He kept circling back to the Richard Serra pieces for some reason:

And there were some fun unexpected compositions that surfaced from that:

This day I think I only took these, by the way:

So hilariously I came to realize that I actually *don’t* have any pictures of Dia from when we visited before — as I suspected, you used to not be able to take pictures inside the galleries (nowadays it seems you can take pictures everywhere because social media I guess — they’ll even let you take a picture of the curtain call at a Broadway show). Anyway, thus the Dia Beacon pics.

Beaver Pond Campground in Harriman State Park:

Metro-North Hudson Line:

Westchester County Updates

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Westchester in Yonkers:

Elsewhere in Yonkers, Trevor Park and the JFK Marina and Park just off the Glenwood Metro-North station:

The Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, which traces the path of the original tunnel that brought water to New York City from reservoirs upstate, runs mostly uninterrupted for 41 miles from the city to Croton Gorge Park near Croton-on-Hudson. This section of trail is just south of the park:

This is one of several stone ventilator shafts used to circulate air through the aqueduct:

At Croton Gorge Park, the nearly 300-foot-high New Croton Dam holds back the New Croton Reservoir behind it:

Turkey Mountain Nature Preserve near Yorktown Heights:

Hardscrabble Wilderness Area in Briarcliff Manor:

Sledding at Gedney Park near Millwood:

Mount Kisco:

The charming The Hamlet British Store right by the train station in Mount Kisco has tons of imported goodies:

Cranberry Lake Preserve near the Kensico Reservoir and North White Plains:

Stone quarried from what is now Cranberry Lake Preserve built the dam which you can see at Kensico Dam Plaza:

“The Rising” is Westchester County’s 9/11 Memorial: