Interlocking Walkthrough: ENY (original) (raw)
This week's better-late-than-never interlocking walkthough visits ENY interlocking in lovely, scenic, and family-friendly East New York. Not quite sure if you picked up on the heavy sarcasm in that last sentence, but I'd like to clarify: East New York is not a pleasant place to be! Now, I'm not saying that you have a 98% chance of getting shot, mugged, or stabbed within seconds of leaving the station, I'm sure you'd be perfectly fine. I certainly wouldn't take the family there for a picnic, but if you visit during the daylight hours and don't make it obvious that you want to be mugged (iPhone's in the pockets kids...) you'll be just fine.
Here's a diagram of the location:
Anyways, ENY interlocking and East New York station are a little peculiar in the way they look. While it may seem like East New York is an underground station, it's not. East New York is a grade-level station. It's a grade-level station that is sandwiched by a subway line and the busy Atlantic Avenue on top and East New York Avenue underneath.
To sort of give you a view a look at this sandwich of support columns, I furnished this picture off of a Google Street View shot:
The station entrance is a tiny little staircase in the general area where the arrow is pointing. If you're looking for the supposed "grade-level" station, look for the birch archy-looking thing twoards the left of the screen. On top of that is Atlantic Avenue, and underneath the arches you can just make out the blue handrails that line the East New York Staiton platform. And for those wondering, the subway line on top is the BMT Canarsie Line, which hosts the L train (1 station away is Broadway Junction where you can connect to the A, C, J, and Z trains for service to more pleasant parts of Brooklyn).
And if you're wondering what those two black lines that appeared to be running under the station in the diagram were, that's the Bay Ridge Branch, which is running in the East New York Tunnels at the very bottom of this whole mess. The East New York Tunnels don't have third rail, as they're seen only by the odd NYAR freight train every now and then. (Oh, fun fact about the East New York Tunnels, the tunnels also do not ave any lights in them at all, so it's absolutely pitch black inside. Because of this unique lack of lighting, the tunnel's walls are perfectly clear of graffiti, probably because the vandals don't want to get smacked by a randomly appearing train!)
So at that one cataclysmic point where everything meets, you have a two-tracked freight line underneath a four-lane East New York Avenue under the two-tracked LIRR Atlantic Branch underneath Havens Place (service road) underneath the heavily used Atlantic Avenue underneath the BMT Canarsie Subway Line. The ground there must be carrying a whole lot of weight!
But back to the station, here are a couple of photos of the station:
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| (Photo credit: Matt Green/I'm Just Walkin') |
Just dreamy, isn't it?
Nonetheless, ENY is located on the Atlantic Branch, 4.1 miles from Chaining 0 at Atlantic Terminal. It is located in Brooklyn, the borough line is located a little bit to the east of this location.
Switches
ENY interlocking in it of itself is a pretty simple interlocking. Going east, a train leaves Nostrand Avenue staiton, pulls east, enters the Atlantic Tunnels, runs in that tunnel for a short while, only to emerge from the tunnel a couple feet before the station. The train then enters the 10-car, zone 1 station and after making its station stop, pulls east into ENY interlocking interlocking. There is a crossover from Atlantic Branch 2 (the eastbound track) to Atlantic Branch 1 (the westbound track) and then another crossover from Atlantic 1 to Atlantic 2, and just like that the interlocking ends. The train then goes east for just a couple feet more before re-entering the Atlantic Avenue tunnels which carries the train off towards Jamaica.
Signals
ENY interlocking, like BROOK interlocking to the west, has those odd small colored light signals that fit well in the tunnels. A low quality, black-on-black photo of a signal I captured from a moving train during my field trip to Atlantic Terminal a couple weeks ago is posted at the right.
Towers
ENY interlocking used to be controlled by ENY tower, which was right on the station platform. However, during the 1990's, the tower at ENY was closed and it was only opened when the interlocking would be in service (which is only during service disruptions and the like, as ENY isn't used on a daily bases). This caused a bit of trouble every now and then, because when trains needed to use the interlocking on short notice (i.e. a disabled train or other service disruption up ahead), the train would have to wait for someone to come all the way to East New York to open up the tower and throw the switch. In September 2001, the LIRR rid themselves with ENY tower altogether and remoted all of the switches to BROOK tower, which is manned most days.
Neighbors
To the west of this interlocking lies BROOK 2 interlocking just east of Atlantic Terminal, and to the east lies DUNTON interlocking, one of the three Jamaica interlockings. The mysterious Boland's Landing station is the next real station to the east, but the the former Woodhaven Station lies in the middle of the tunnel in between the two.
One last thing, I have a question for my kind readers, the next interlocking up in the alphabet next week is ESA interlocking (one of the two new interlockings for East Side Access). Would you all like to see a "future" interlocking wlakthrough of how ESA interlocking would be set up, or would you prefer we went straight on to FOX interlocking and visited ESA sometime down the road? Let me know by contacting me (very the bottom of the page) or leaving a comment (bottom of the post). Thanks!