Call it a street car devoutly desired, one that advocates hope will provide clean, reliable public transportation in the Hudson Valley, but which in the short term could provide a boost to tourism in Kingston.
Senior engineers of Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. have met with city of Kingston officials three times, including a meeting last month, to discuss possibly using a 1.5 mile stretch of the old Kingston trolley line running from East Strand to Kingston Point to test a battery-powered light rail vehicle. While San Francisco and Tampa, Fla., are also being considered, Kingston has the advantage of intact streetcar tracks that are not part of a functioning mass transit system.
Diesel streetcars operated on a seasonal basis by the Kingston Trolley Museum Currently are now the only traffic on the trolley line.
“It really would provide us a mini-transit opportunity,” said Steve Finkle, the city”™s director of economic development who, going back more than a quarter century, was involved in purchasing and preserving the trolley tracks in 1983 on the theory they might be needed someday.
Even as a pilot project, he said, Kawasaki and the city of Kingston would benefit from having tourists ride the trolley, which would run basically from the historic section of retail stores, restaurants and museums along the Rondout Creek to the Hudson River at Kingston Point. “It will be a prominent attraction for people to use this technology,” Finkle said, while engineers could assess the performance of the vehicle under real-life conditions. He said the pilot program would run for about two years.
Finkle said Kingston also has the advantage of the Trolley Museum facilities being located along the trolley line, with space enough to store equipment. And he said that the climate would test equipment in ways Tampa”™s and San Francisco”™s climates do not.Â
The battery technology, already in use in a test project in Japan, eliminates the need for overhead wires, used by traditional trolleys thus preserving the region”™s aesthetics and simplifying infrastructure. And it eliminates use of the fossil fuels that often power buses and other forms of public transportation.
While Kawasaki is a Japanese-based industrial giant, Kawasaki Rail Car Inc. has for several decades had its American headquarters in Yonkers.
“We are just talking with Kingston, it is basically in its infancy right now,” said Omar Messado, manager of the Kawasaki facility in Yonkers. He said that the technology has been in development for about six years and said that Kawasaki is likely to deploy the pilot project within two years, calling it “A flagship program in the U.S.” Â
According to a company press release provided by Messado, the light-rail train stores power created through a regenerating brake system, which leads to significant energy savings. The absence of “unsightly overhead lines” allows the easy opening of new lines and extensions, the company claims, “features that are beneficial to railway operators in planning versatile vehicle systems.”
Additionally Kawasaki’s “Gigacell” battery is billed as being tailored to large-scale applications, with quick charge/discharge capabilities and is said to be easily disassembled and recycled; it also contains no hazardous materials such as lead, sodium or lithium.
But there is an old-fashioned reasons for considering Kingston as a pilot site. “We were interested to find that much of Kingston”™s trolley track was sill in place,” Messado said, compared to most cities which tore up their track long ago and paved them over. “So it presents a potential for Kawasaki to perhaps use Kingston as a test.”
Kawasaki became aware of the Kingston Point Streetcar line after consultants hired by the city to help foment revitalization of the waterfront in the area tipped off city officials that the company was looking for a U.S testing ground for the battery-powered vehicle. “The consultants brought us together” said Finkle.
To increase chances of becoming the test site, the city is hoping to entice Kawasaki with a newly refurbished track, if the federal government provides the funding as part of the economic stimulus package proposed by President-elect Obama. Kingston is seeking $1.6 million to refurbish the rail line for the demonstration project. But even absent federal help, “We will find the resources” for improving the tracks, said Finkle. “We have a lot of criteria that would support their testing efforts. We are hopeful and optimistic we can work out a partnership.”Â
