I-684/I-687 "NYW&B" plus Upstate Gateway- further developed

My earlier article:

https://cos-mobile.blogspot.com/2023/12/ny-requires-constructing-revived.html

 

The need for a modern expressway extending northward from the Co Op City area 233rd Street ramps is indisputable. The route would of course follow the old "NY, Westchester & Boston" RR corridor, and it would definitely INCLUDE the entire segment from the northern end of the "Dyre Avenue" IRT, into downtown White Plains within a a reconstructed Westchester Mall, with an extension to Westchester County Airport. The restored RR would include architecturally faithful "NY&B" stations at Sanford Street, East 3rd Street, and Columbus Avenue for a transfer to the Metro North in Mt Vernon, and at Wykagil in New Rochelle, with a new underground Heathecote Junction station in Scarsdale, likely with some new mixed use buildings in the style of downtown Scarsdale.  Having lived nearby, I can see the idea of a restoration of the Marx Estate Mansion, as an integral part of a redevelopment featuring military campus scale residential condominiums - with a first right of refusal for existing residents displaced, with sufficient units to offer as well to newcomers - akin to the Marx Mansion architecture.  And my intuition tells me that others already have this vision.  I can NOT be the only person seeing that potential.

 

It would exclude the branch through Pelham.

 

It would be an exact restoration of the original alignment, EXCEPT for the segment from near Pine Brook Boulevard, in Scarsdale, and in White Plains except for a few hundred feet south of the Westchester Mall. And it would exclude the "Quaker Ridge" station at 556 Stratton Rd- a historic landmark in a marshy low lying wetter area. 

 

The expressway would start at I-95, with connections to Route 1. 

 

It would be underground, encased and filtered cut and cover along the western side of the IRT, with a elevated, styled northbound segment to the east that enters the aforementioned tunnel, remaining fully underground to the vicinity of East 3rd Street, and either going under or over the Metro North (depending upon feasibility), before transitioning to an aerial tunnel extending northerly, alongside the restored "NYW&B" within a enclosure mimicking the style of the old elevated stations that were demolished by the 1950s. 

 

Both expressway and RR would enter an enclosed underground segment just south of Wykagil, where we would have an underground station and concourse, with a lower level for a transfer to the start of an all new RR line that branches off with I-687. This would be fully underground, passing in a cut and cover tunnel alongside Morrison and beneath the Hutchinson River Parkway "hump" where the Wilmont Avenue ramps join that, and continue as cut and cover beneath the front portion of Iona Prep, and continue as tunnel into Eastchester principally through cut and cover within a golf course, to a new train station west of Route 22. 

 

From there, the expressway would emerge upon a new bridge crossing over the Bronx River Valley, with the RR carried in its lower deck, before landing near Central Avenue with a new station in the former Alexanders site. This would continue west, with a tunnel segment along/beneath Jackson Avenue, continuing to a new trans Hudson River Bridge to Alpine, N.J., connecting to the Palisades Parkway corridor to and from the northwest, and with the RR connecting into the existing RR network with improvements. 

 

These pair of expressways together with these accompanying pair of railroads would serve a vital national security need for evacuation from NYC and Long Island, open up the Catskills for significantly greater economic development, while serving as an initial leg of a new transcontinental railroad.