Car float

A railroad car float or rail barge is a specialised form of lighter[1] with railway tracks mounted on its deck used to move rolling stock across water obstacles, or to locations they could not otherwise go.

[2] Beginning in the 1830s, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) operated a car float across the Potomac River, just south of Washington, D.C., between Shepherds Landing on the east shore, and Alexandria, Virginia on the west.

[3] The Port of New York and New Jersey had many car float operations, which lost ground to the post-World War II expansion of trucking, but held out until the rise of containerization in the 1970s.

[4] These car floats operated between the Class 1 railroads terminals on the west bank of Hudson River in Hudson County, New Jersey and the numerous online and offline terminals located in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan.

At their peak, the railroads had 3,400 employees operating small fleets totalling 323 car floats, plus 1,094 other barges, towed by 150 tugboats between New Jersey and New York City.