The contractor repairing New York City’s leaking aqueduct rebuilt this CSX railroad crossing at Water and Washington streets in Newburgh so the company’s trucks could use it. [JUDY RIFE/TIMES HERALD-RECORD] ▲

CITY OF NEWBURGH – Have you noticed the newly rebuilt railroad crossing at Washington and Water streets?

Praise not CSX, however, for finally getting around to leveling the steeply-graded crossing and replacing the broken, rutted pavement around it.

Remember it took no less a personage than U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer to badger CSX into fixing two arguably less-dangerous crossings in New Windsor earlier this year.

Give credit instead to New York City's $1 billion project to repair its leaking Delaware Aqueduct.

"I can't tell you how happy we are to get a new crossing out of this at no expense to the city,'' said Newburgh City Manager Joe Donat. "It's been a regular site of motor vehicle accidents for years."

The four-way intersection is the primary access point for Newburgh's People's Park and public boat launch, as well as the Newburgh-Beacon ferry and the row of waterfront restaurants.

The city Department of Environmental Protection's contractor, Kiewit-Shea of Omaha, Neb., had to rebuild the crossing so trucks carrying the 80,000-pound pipes that will line the new bypass tunnel could manage the grade over the tracks.

Kiewit finished boring the 2.5-mile-long bypass tunnel 600 feet beneath the Hudson River last month. It will eventually be connected to the aqueduct and around its leaks.

The pipes – 16 feet in diameter and 40 feet in length – have been stored at Water Street and Walsh Road and are now being moved to the project site eight miles away, off Route 9W north of Middlehope in the Town of Newburgh.

The route takes the trucks over the CSX tracks to the Steelways Inc. yard and north, along a Newburgh right-of-way past the sewage treatment plant, to Washington Street and then back across the tracks to Water Street – and on to Route 9W. The zig-zag is necessary because the pipes are too big to pass beneath an overpass on Water Street.

The DEP said Kiewit put the cost of fixing both the crossing and the right-of-way at $300,000 – and it almost didn't happen.

Kiewit originally wanted to have barges deliver the 230 pipes in the vicinity of the Danskammer power-plant complex, a short distance from the project site, but the property's ownership was in flux at the time and it could never reach an agreement.

Subsequently, the contractor arranged for the pipes to come ashore at Steelways and be stored nearby – and so Newburgh got its new railroad crossing.

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