A New York Central local swings out of Weehawken in 1954, bound for north Jersey suburbs. A haze-shrouded Empire State Building rises in the background.

Having been born in New York City, I prudently decided to move away from the place at an early age. But it was impossible to stay away forever, and in the early 1950s I came back to attend Columbia University’s business school.

My major at Columbia was transportation economics, and numerous subway trips to the waterfront gave me a firsthand look at everything that was uneconomic in rail transportation.

As a student, I had no responsibility for any of this and could simply marvel at those tall-stacked steam ferries and tooting tugs of nine different railroads doing their complex choreography, floating cars to be switched by ancient Ingersoll-Rand boxcab diesels at the little Manhattan and Bronx terminals, interchanging cars, and delivering to steamship piers—all the while dodging oceangoing ships and the commercial barge traffic.

Herbert H. Harwood, Jr.

Two deckhands work as a float crosses the Upper Bay between Jersey City and Brooklyn in 1967.

It mattered little that the costs per passenger or per ton of freight were clearly enormous for a group of railroads that were struggling to begin with. The main things to me were the aesthetic delight and the wonder of how anybody could keep it all straight.

I came back to the harbor in the 1960s mostly on the way to business meetings. The only civilized way to enter Manhattan was by ferry, and I carried a camera on these trips whenever I could, knowing full well that what I was seeing wasn’t going to last.

Photographer Harwood was intrigued by the B&O's marine-based operations in Manhattan, which included a float bridge at West 26th Street.

In 1967, I was shepherd for a group of Chessie System management trainees who spent a day riding B&O tugs making their rounds. Two things stick with me from that experience. First and most memorable was my awe and admiration for the skill of the crews who seemed to jockey their lighters and carfloats (in some cases, two lashed together) around the crowded waterways and in and out of float bridge terminals like they were driving a Honda Civic.

But second was the appalling economics and the sobering certainty that all of that skill would be obsolete. My particular crew had spent its entire working shift delivering one carfloat from Jersey City to the Atlantic Basin in Brooklyn and interchanging cars with the Long Island Rail Road at Long Island City.

Their world—and much of the larger world of New York marine railroading depicted in these photographs—would be gone within a few years.