Cedar Hill Yard is a classification yard located in New Haven, North Haven and Hamden, Connecticut, United States. It was built by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (often known simply as The New Haven) in the early 1890s in and around New Haven's Cedar Hill neighborhood, which gave the yard its name. Electrical catenary for electric locomotives was added to the yard in 1915. To handle increasing traffic as a result of World War I, the yard was greatly expanded between 1917 and 1920 with additional construction along both sides of the Quinnipiac River. The construction project added two humps where railroad cars were sorted into trains by gravity. The yard was further modernized in the 1920s, becoming one of the busiest railroad yards in the United States, and the most important yard in the entire New Haven Railroad system.
At its peak during World War II, Cedar Hill Yard handled more than 5,000 railroad cars per day. Following the end of the war the yard's importance began to decline, as freight traffic across New England shifted to road transport, and heavy industry left the region. Much of the yard began to fall into decay following the New Haven Railroad's bankruptcy in 1961. Following the opening of the newly rebuilt Selkirk Yard near Albany, New York, in 1968, much of the traffic formerly handled at Cedar Hill Yard was directed there instead, and car float service between Cedar Hill Yard and New York City ended.
In 1969, the Penn Central Transportation Company took over the yard as part of its purchase of the New Haven Railroad. The yard's new owner promptly removed the electrical catenary and shut down one of the yard's two humps to save money. The next year, Penn Central went bankrupt, and the yard continued to deteriorate from deferred maintenance. Under Penn Central, the yard's importance further declined when the Poughkeepsie Bridge, the yard's key link to the rest of the United States, was damaged by a fire in 1974 and not replaced. Conrail, a new freight railroad formed by the United States government to reverse the fortunes of Penn Central and other bankrupt Northeastern United States railroads, took over operations in 1976. The yard's new owner initially made some improvements, but in 1980 decided to close the yard's remaining hump and move more operations to the yard in Selkirk. Cedar Hill Yard continued to be used to classify freight trains, but was turned into a flat yard, with trains built up and broken down by switcher locomotives.
Cedar Hill Yard was operated by Conrail until 1999, when CSX Transportation purchased Conrail's New England operations. In the first decade of the 2000s, CSX expanded the yard's operations by constructing a bulk cargo transfer facility, where bulk commodities are transferred between trains and trucks. CSX was joined in the yard by other railroads, including Amtrak, which uses part of the yard as a base for maintenance of way operations on the Northeast Corridor. Two other freight railroads also operate freight trains to and from the yard in the 2020s, including the Providence and Worcester Railroad and Connecticut Southern Railroad. Cedar Hill Yard remains the largest classification yard in Connecticut as of 2022 despite its diminished size. Proposals exist to rebuild portions of the yard, potentially in concert with the construction of the proposed Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel in New York City or the resumption of car float service across Long Island Sound.
History
Before 1917 The first instance of Cedar Hill Yard was built in the early 1890s by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (The New Haven) in and around the Cedar Hill neighborhood of the city of New Haven, on flat lands adjacent to the Quinnipiac River. The yard first opened for service in December 1894, with a capacity of approximately 400 railroad cars. Less than a year later, the new yard caused a dispute between the railroad and its employees. Once Cedar Hill Yard opened, train crews had to stop their trains within the new yard as opposed to the yard in New Haven proper, which reportedly increased their shifts by several hours. Employees demanded extra pay for the longer hours, but the railroad refused, leading several train crews to walk off the job. One railway man was quoted by a local newspaper as saying:
Operations at the yard came to a halt on November 21, 1901, when approximately 125 switchmen and brakemen went on strike in solidarity with strikers at Mott Haven. The New Haven's president John M. Hall asserted the strike would quickly end, as the strikers had no specific grievances beyond sympathy for the Mott Haven strikers, who had gone on strike following the abrupt termination of the yard's assistant yard master. The strike came to an end on November 23.
On July 31, 1904, a deadly train collision occurred just outside of Cedar Hill Yard. The New Haven's White Mountain passenger train collided with the rear of a freight train attempting to pull into a siding by the yard, resulting in the death of the White Mountain's engineer, while the train's fireman survived with severe injuries. A coroner found the crew of the freight train criminally responsible for the crash, as they had neglected to send a flagman behind their train to warn the White Mountain, which they knew was due to arrive, that the tracks were not clear. As a result of the crash, operations were changed so that all northbound trains entered the yard at the south end.
In 1913, the New Haven began adding electrical catenary to the yard as part of its electrification program; electrification was completed by July 1915. By 1915, it was apparent the existing yard was not large enough to handle the amount of freight it was receiving. A local newspaper reported that "There were so many freight cars lying in the yard that switchers could not travel from the north to the south end of the yards." The severity of the freight congestion was enough to delay the New Haven's passenger trains through the area as well.
The yard is expanded, 1917 to 1920
The New Haven Railroad purchased approximately of land in the Cedar Hill area in 1917 in order to construct a new classification yard. Originally, the company had planned to build a new yard in nearby Woodmont, but instead built it at Cedar Hill due to local opposition. Construction began the same year. The expansion project was initially budgeted at $10 million ($ in ), but upon the United States Railroad Administration's takeover of all U.S. railroads in December 1917 following U.S. entry into World War I, the federal government doubled the project's budget to $20 million and allocated government engineers to assist in construction. This greatly increased the scope of the project, with the terminal and facilities estimated to take up more than of land in total upon completion.
Design Cedar Hill was chosen as the site for the new classification yard for a variety of reasons. New Haven was the nexus of eight different railroad routes operated by the New Haven Railroad, including lines to New York City, Danbury, Waterbury, Northampton, Hartford, Middletown, New London, and the docks in New Haven south of the yard. Cedar Hill was also the eastern end of the New Haven's electrification, was centrally located in the railroad's system, and was at a good location for locomotives travelling between New York City and Boston to stop for servicing. Other factors included the significant industrial activity in the city of New Haven, the high cost of buying property any closer to New York City, and the New Haven's existing facilities and land in the area.
The yard's design called for a capacity of 180 cars per hour over two humps, for a classification capacity of 4,320 cars each day. Significant design work went into planning the height and slope of the yard's humps, so that cars rolling downhill would travel at the desired speeds, accelerating up to after passing through the switches. Several tracks were planned that travelled between the humps and the classification yards and accommodated speeders; these were used by the workers who rode along with the cars down the hump and manually applied handbrakes to slow them down. Using speeders to return to the hump instead of walking saved time and required fewer workers to handle the same number of cars per hour. Additional planned facilities included a yard for storing materials and a coal storage yard with a capacity of of coal.
As part of the yard's construction, the New Haven completed a grade separation at the south end of the yard, where lines from New Haven to Hartford, New London, and Middletown met. This eliminated all diamond crossings between different routes at Cedar Hill, removing a long-standing bottleneck on the New Haven Railroad's system.
Construction
The site for the new expanded yard largely consisted of marshland, which complicated construction. Over of fill was required for the project, which had to be delivered from cuts made elsewhere on the New Haven system. In particular, the two humps had to be built on the previously flat land, with one of them being in height. To accomplish this, trestles were built and then buried with fill, creating the hills needed for the humps. Construction of the trestles required piles to be driven up to underground due to the soft soil. For moving and transporting soil, the New Haven Railroad purchased 120 side-dump gondolas, and seven steam shovels worked to fill the side-dump cars at cut sites. Locomotives backed trains of 15 gondolas at a time up the trestles, and dumped fill under them until the fill was level with the tracks, leaving the trestles covered by soil.
As part of the yard's expansion, a new freight transfer station to handle less-than-car load freight was built, which opened in July 1920. This eleven-track transfer facility was equipped with what were at the time very modern battery-powered freight tractors to sort freight throughout the facility, and could handle over 300 freight cars per day. As a result of the opening of the transfer facility, located in the center of the yard, the New Haven Railroad was able to close multiple similar but less modern facilities across its system. The new Cedar Hill Yard finished construction in 1920. At the time of its completion, Cedar Hill was the largest railyard east of the Mississippi River in the United States.
1920 to 1950
Despite hopes that the new yard would eliminate traffic problems, traffic volumes continued to skyrocket after the new Cedar Hill Yard opened, and in the first few years of operations it suffered from congestion. The freight portion of the nearby Water Street Yard, which was closed when the expansion of Cedar Hill Yard was completed, was reopened in March 1922 to relieve capacity issues. The next year, one local manufacturer declared at a hearing of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that the new yard had failed in improving capacity and speed of freight shipments, a sentiment shared by Grand Trunk Pacific Railway president Howard G. Kelley. Kelley was part of the Storrow committee, a group working to draft policy for the New England railroad system. That the New Haven had spent so much money to build Cedar Hill Yard was considered by critics and some members of the committee as evidence that New England's railroads should be consolidated into a single system, though the ICC's commissioners were skeptical of such a proposal.
An automatic train stop system was installed from Cedar Hill Yard north to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1925, with it entering operation on the first of September. In 1926, Cedar Hill handled 97,328 cars per month, for an average of 3,200 cars each day. Particularly busy days saw over 4,000 cars classified in 24 hours. By 1928, Cedar Hill Yard and its surrounding facilities occupied of land. The massive yards had a capacity of over 15,000 railroad cars.