Photo by Lori Van Buren – Albany Times UnionPhoto by Lori Van Buren – Albany Times UnionPhoto by Lori Van Buren – Albany Times UnionPhoto by Lori Van Buren – Albany Times Union
Photos from earlier today (mostly from Times Union newspaper – Lori Van Buren) of boats that broke loose from the Troy docks., due to weather conditions) and ended up at the Livingston Ave. Railroad Bridge.
It was the first bridge built over the Hudson at Albany.
The bridge was opened in 1866, after decades of wrangling. It was built by Titan of the Gilded Age Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt who saw the future in transcontinental railways and divested himself of his shipping concerns to buy up railroads.
AND then.. he denied bridge access to several other RR lines, which denied them access to NYC, until they caved. All part of his plan to create a New York Central Railroad monopoly. Crafty devil. In a matter of days he controlled 40% of rail lines in the U.S.
5 years later the Maiden Lane RR bridge was built (demolished circa 1971 after train station moved Rensselaer).
(Passenger rail lines were in bankruptcy or on the brink across almost all the country by the late 1960s. AMTRAK, a quasi governmental organization, was created in the Nixon Administration to salvage what was left and keep passenger trains running.)
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