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Selkirk Yard

Selkirk Yard is a freight railroad yard located in Selkirk, New York. It is owned by CSX Transportation.

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ7448558
Source-derived summary

Selkirk Yard is a large freight railroad yard located in Selkirk, New York, about 8 mi (13 km) south of Albany. The yard is owned by CSX Transportation and is its major classification yard for the northeastern United States and the gateway to points east of the Hudson River, including New York City. It is situated just west of the Alfred H. Smith Memorial Bridge on the railroad's Castleton Subdivision, and is the eastern end of the Selkirk Subdivision.

History

Selkirk Yard was built in 1924 by the New York Central Railroad on a 700-acre (280 ha) site. Initially, it had two hump classification yards with a capacity of 11,000 cars and typically handled 8,000 cars per day.

1968 rebuild

The facility was rebuilt in 1968 as the Alfred E. Perlman Yard, on an expanded site of 1,250 acres (510 ha). It features a 70-track classification hump yard, several support yards and servicing facilities. The yard can process over 3,200 cars per day, using computerized controls that originally employed a GE PAC 4020.

Recent improvements

Improvements in 2011 included an automobile transload facility and a genset switching locomotive, to improve air quality by reducing emissions from yard operations.

Since 2017, Selkirk features a two-track mainline that runs east to west on the south side of the yard, allowing many run-through trains to swap crews more quickly and easily.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Selkirk Yard” as selkirk Yard is a freight railroad yard located in Selkirk, New York. It is owned by CSX Transportation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Selkirk, Yard and freight.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1924, 1968, 2011, 2017—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Selkirk, Yard and freight providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Selkirk Yard”, the useful work is to connect “selkirk Yard is a freight railroad yard located in Selkirk, New York. It is owned by CSX Transportation” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7448558. Authority coordinates are 42.553, -73.835. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1968, 2011 and 2017.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Selkirk Yard primary sources, Selkirk Yard archive and Selkirk research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Selkirk Yard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.