Weehawken Terminal, Serving The West Shore Railroad

Last revised: September 17, 2026

Weehawken Terminal was the New York Central’s Hudson River face that was not Grand Central. It sat on fill at the foot of the Palisades in Weehawken, New Jersey, opposite midtown Manhattan, and it was built so the West Shore Railroad could put trains on a ferry without using someone else’s Jersey City station. The New York, West Shore & Buffalo bored a 4,014-foot tunnel through Bergen Hill in 1881–83. The waterfront plant opened in 1884: five ferry slips, sixteen passenger tracks, car floats, and yards. Ferries ran to West 42nd Street and to Cortlandt Street. The New York, Ontario & Western used the same tunnel and the same slips. The last boat, named Weehawken, left at 1:10 a.m. on March 25, 1959. West Shore coaches had already stopped. The site is now known as the Weehawken Port Imperial: Hudson-Bergen Light Rail through the old tunnel, New York Waterway at a new slip, New Jersey Transit buses on the fill.

Aerial view of New York Central Weehawken Terminal in Weehawken New Jersey circa 1955 with the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson

New York Central’s Weehawken Terminal, Weehawken, New Jersey, circa 1955, Manhattan across the river. The plant served the West Shore Division and Ontario & Western trains until 1953. Passenger service ended in 1959. Meyer Pearlman photo. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · Five terminals · Slough’s Meadow · Weehawken Tunnel · 1884 · Ferries and the Lincoln Highway · Streetcars · Ontario & Western · March 25, 1959 · Port Imperial

At a glance

Item	Detail
Location	Weehawken, New Jersey. Foot of Pershing Road, north of Weehawken Cove, on filled estuary once called Slough’s Meadow. About 40°46′18″ N, 74°00′46″ W
Opened	1884. West Shore trains had used the Pennsylvania’s Exchange Place from June 4, 1883, while this plant finished
Closed to passengers	1959. Last ferry 1:10 a.m., March 25, 1959, boat Weehawken
Owner / operator	New York, West Shore & Buffalo; West Shore Railroad from December 5, 1885; New York Central (475-year lease from January 1, 1886). Penn Central 1968. Conrail 1976
Railroad tenants	West Shore / NYC. Ontario & Western (to September 10, 1953). New Jersey Junction Railroad south along the waterfront
Plant	Five ferry slips. Sixteen passenger tracks. Car-float bridges. Freight yards. Passenger station at the slips
Tunnel	Weehawken Tunnel, 4,014 feet, 1881–83. Two tracks as built, 27 feet wide, 21 feet high. Chief engineer Walter Katte. HAER NJ-109-A
Ferries	West 42nd Street (midtown) and Cortlandt Street (downtown). A Weehawken–Manhattan franchise dated to 1700
Streetcars	Pershing Road, 1892–1949. North Hudson County Railway, later Public Service Railway
Today	Weehawken Port Imperial. Hudson-Bergen Light Rail in the tunnel (full service October 29, 2006). New York Waterway ferry terminal (new building May 2006; service restored 1986). NJ Transit buses

Tunnel dimensions follow Historic American Engineering Record NJ-109-A (Lynn Drobbin). Last-ferry time is Arthur G. Adams, The Hudson Through the Years. Information compiled September 17, 2026.

The northernmost of five

From the 1880s until the 1950s five railroad ferry terminals lined the New Jersey Hudson, north to south: Weehawken (West Shore / New York Central), Hoboken (Lackawanna), Pavonia (Erie), Exchange Place (Pennsylvania), and Communipaw (Central Railroad of New Jersey). Hoboken is the one that still takes trains. Weehawken was the northern plant, aimed at 42nd Street rather than the downtown slips the Pennsy and the Jersey Central used. The Central already had Grand Central on the east bank. Weehawken was how it reached Manhattan from a railroad that never crossed the Hudson.

Slough’s Meadow

The waterfront was a tidal meadow, Slough’s Meadow, a narrow strip between the Palisades and the river north of Weehawken Cove. The West Shore filled it. Tracks from the east portal of the tunnel fanned toward piers and slips. The company talked of twelve deep-water piers; what it built was a working mix of passenger slips, car floats, and freight yard. United Fruit later kept what was then the largest banana warehouse in the United States beside the berths. Pershing Road climbed the cliff from the fill to the top of the Palisades, the only highway grade off the property.

The New Jersey Junction Railroad, a Central waterfront line, ran south from the terminal toward Jersey City and connected the West Shore to the rest of the harbor. After passenger service died that right-of-way became Penn Central’s River Division, then Conrail’s River Line, then—south of the tunnel—Hudson-Bergen Light Rail.

Walter Katte’s hole in the Palisades

A railroad on the west bank still had to get through Bergen Hill. Walter Katte (1830–1917), chief engineer of the New York, West Shore & Buffalo, designed and built the Weehawken Tunnel in 1881–83. Historic American Engineering Record NJ-109-A is the survey: 4,014 feet from the west portal in North Bergen to the east portal in Weehawken, under 48th Street through Weehawken, Union City, and West New York. Two tracks, centerlines 13 feet apart. Semi-elliptical arch, nearly vertical walls, 27 feet wide, 21 feet high (19 feet rail to crown). About three-quarters of the length was left as Palisades diabase, unlined. Eight brick-lined sections covered the weaker ground. Crews worked from both portals and from five shafts, about 450 men in 12-hour shifts. The east portal flared to about 100 feet so tracks could split toward the slips.

Harvey L. Berliner and colleagues, writing for the Transportation Research Board when NJ Transit rebuilt the bore for light rail, used the same HAER numbers. The original two-track freight-and-passenger hole is the one light rail still occupies, enlarged by blasting for a mid-tunnel station about 160 feet under Union City (Bergenline Avenue).

June 4, 1883, then 1884

West Shore passenger trains began June 4, 1883, Jersey City to Newburgh. Weehawken was not finished. Alvin F. Harlow, in The Road of the Century, has them using the Pennsylvania’s Exchange Place station and ferries. The tunnel had been driven. The slips, the sixteen tracks, and the station opened in 1884. Buffalo service was proclaimed January 1, 1884. The company that owned the plant went into receivership that June. J. P. Morgan’s settlement put the West Shore under the Central: foreclosure November 24, 1885, West Shore Railroad December 5, 475-year lease from January 1, 1886. That corporate story is the West Shore page. From 1886 the terminal was a New York Central machine that still said West Shore on the timetables.

Named trains later in the Central era included the Storm King Limited and the West Pointer, Weehawken to Albany. Commuters filled the south end: Ridgefield Park, Bogota, Teaneck, Dumont, Tappan, Orangeburg, West Nyack, Congers, Haverstraw. Those names are a 1948 public timetable and the December 1954 Official Guide, not a second station list.

The 42nd Street boat, and a 1700 patent

Governor Richard Coote of New York patented a Weehawken–Manhattan ferry in 1700. Sail and oars, then steamboats. The New Jersey Midland bought the route in 1871. When the West Shore opened, the railroad ferry became the reason the terminal existed. The main boat ran to West 42nd Street. Another ran to the Cortlandt Street Ferry Depot downtown. Raymond J. Baxter and Arthur G. Adams, Railroad Ferries of the Hudson, is the book for the slips.

From 1913 until the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927, the 42nd Street ferry was a piece of two early transcontinental auto roads, the National Old Trails Road and the Lincoln Highway. Both began at Times Square, crossed on the boat, and climbed Pershing Road. The George Washington Bridge (1931) and the Lincoln Tunnel (1937)—the tunnel almost parallel to the 42nd Street crossing—took that traffic. HAER notes West Shore annual commuter ridership down to about 15,000 after the bridge. The Tappan Zee Bridge and the New York State Thruway in the 1950s finished the argument.

The last railroad ferry was the Weehawken, 1:10 a.m., March 25, 1959. Adams counts 259 years from Coote’s patent. New York Waterway put boats back on the Weehawken waterfront in 1986, first from a converted ferry moored south of the old slips. NJ Transit’s new ferry building, leased to NY Waterway, opened in May 2006. Boats now run to Pier 79 (West Midtown), Battery Park City, and Pier 11 / Wall Street. That is not the 1959 railroad ferry. It is the same river.

Pershing Road cars, and a brief elevator

Streetcars tied the cliff-top towns to the slips. From 1892 to 1949 cars of the North Hudson County Railway, later Public Service Railway, ran Pershing Road: lines 19 Union City, 21 West New York, 23 Palisade, 25 Weehawken. For a few years in the 1890s a large elevator, the so-called Colossus of Weehawken, lifted passengers to a trestle that served amusement grounds—Eldorado, a pleasure garden, Nungesser’s Guttenberg racetrack. The trestle died with the fads. The Pershing Road cars lasted until buses took the hill.

Ontario & Western at the slips

The Ontario & Western never owned the Palisades. It held trackage rights on the West Shore from Cornwall, a connection built in 1883, and used Weehawken as its New York ferry without building one. About 52 miles of West Shore iron, plus the tunnel and the slips. O&W passenger trains last ran into Weehawken on September 10, 1953. The company was abandoned March 29, 1957. That railroad is the Ontario & Western page. This page keeps the tenant.

1958, 1959

West Shore passenger service to Albany ended in 1958. The last trains to West Haverstraw ran in 1959. That was the end of Central coaches on the west side of the Hudson, and the end of the terminal as a station. Freight on the New Jersey Junction and the yards lasted longer, through Penn Central and into Conrail. The passenger headhouse, the slips, and the sixteen tracks came down for waterfront redevelopment. There was no 1960s last-train ceremony of the Pavonia sort that left a road number and a minute on the clock. The clock that is on the record is the ferry: 1:10 a.m., March 25, 1959.

Port Imperial, not a station

The fill is Weehawken Port Imperial, not Lincoln Harbor. Lincoln Harbor is the cove neighborhood to the south. NJ Transit rebuilt and waterproofed Katte’s tunnel for Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. A mid-tunnel station at Bergenline Avenue opened with the light-rail extension. Port Imperial station ran weekends from November 2005 and full service from October 29, 2006. The light rail comes out of the east portal onto the old waterfront and continues south on the former Junction alignment. CSX’s River Subdivision, the old West Shore freight main, starts west of the Palisades at North Bergen Yard and does not use the tunnel.

The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway crosses the bulkhead. The banana warehouse is commercial space. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 went into the river off this shore; the ferries that still work here helped take people off the wings. That is not a railroad story. It is what the slips became: boats, light rail, buses, apartments, and a view of 42nd Street that the West Shore built the plant to reach.

Sources

Historic American Engineering Record NJ-109-A. Lynn Drobbin, historian. Weehawken Tunnel 1881–83, Walter Katte, 4,014 feet, 27 × 21 feet, two tracks; ridership after the George Washington Bridge; four main tracks Ridgefield Park to the state line
Berliner, Harvey L., David W. Campo, Charles N. Dickerson, and Glenn Mack. “Design and Construction of the Weehawken Tunnel and Bergenline Avenue Station for the Hudson–Bergen Light Rail Transit System.” Transportation Research Circular E-C058, November 2003. Original bore; HBLR enlargement and mid-tunnel station
Adams, Arthur G. The Hudson Through the Years. Fordham University Press, 1996. Last ferry Weehawken, March 25, 1959, 1:10 a.m.
Baxter, Raymond J., and Arthur G. Adams. Railroad Ferries of the Hudson. Fordham University Press, 1999, p. 124
Harlow, Alvin F. The Road of the Century. June 4, 1883 via Exchange Place; Weehawken not yet complete
Sherman, Lauren, and Ellen Robb Gaulkin. Weehawken (Images of America). Arcadia, 2009
New York Central public timetable, April 25, 1948; Official Guide, December 1954, Table 80. West Shore stations out of Weehawken
American-Rails.com: West Shore Railroad; New York Central; Ontario & Western; Hoboken, Pavonia, Exchange Place, Communipaw; Grand Central

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