Carver Companies, owner and operator of the Port of Coeymans near Albany, New York, have the facility, manpower, and equipment both ashore and afloat to handle big projects.
Carver Companies in recent months have been busy — and busy quite literally in a big way.
Carver, which owns and operates the Port of Coeymans, is located on the Hudson River near Albany, around 115-miles from New York Harbor. The company is basically divided into three overlapping operating sections: Construction, Maritime and Materials with the company’s activities stretching up and down the East Coast. This collection of companies enables Carver to take on a wide variety of jobs ranging from handling road salt to moving rail bridges. As Stephen Kelly, President of Sales and Business Development, Carver Companies explained in an interview with AJOT, “We just finished up the Portal North Bridge down in New Jersey, and we’re getting ready for the Livingston Avenue Bridge, which will start sometime in late August [2025].”
In February 2025, Carver delivered the third and final section of the $1.7 billion Portal North Bridge — a two-track replacement commuter rail bridge that is part of the New York City Gateway Program. The new bridge replaces the 114-year-old Portal Bridge which spans the Hackensack River and connects Amtrak and NJ TRANSIT rail services in New York City to Newark, New Jersey. With no place to detour trains when the bridge was up, there was a slowdown in rail service. And the traffic across the choke point included twelve Amtrak passenger trains and roughly two to six freight trains (Canadian Pacific Railway and CSX) daily.
All three sections of the bridge were built at Carver’s Port of Coeymans facilities. The “infrastructure staging” has become a big business segment for Carver with construction companies like the Skanska Traylor Joint Venture, which constructed the sections, needing the open space, heavy lift capabilities and waterway access the site provides.
A Long Tow
The final span was transferred from the Coeymans assembly site to the tug and barge combo operated by Carver Marine Towing for the 135-mile trip down the Hudson River to the bridge site. The other two sections of the bridge had made the same voyage in November 2024 and January of 2025.
But the transfer to the barge and tow were only possible after “hundreds of man-hours…just prepping the tow, making arrangements and reviewing all the plans and so forth,” Kelly said of the process.
And it was preparation with good reason as the bridge section was a “big” load by any measure. The final section of the bridge is 400-feet long, 78-feet wide and 86-feet high and weighed around 2,500 tons. A true heavy lift move.
The long tow and ultimate positioning of the last section of the bridge represented the culmination of years of planning and work. As Kelly said of the project, “We were actively involved in weekly meetings from around December of ‘23 to the bitter end every week, discussing plans with the engineers and making sure we had everything ready at the dock and all the right ballasts and everything down to the vendors on the berth.”
Other Big Projects
Of course, for Carver there have been a number of other notable projects involving oversized loads. For example, Carver arranged the delivery of the Ralph Wilson Park Bridge, which serves as the entrance to the Ralph Wilson Park in Buffalo. The Ralph Wilson Park Bridge was built in Italy [Cimolai-HY, a manufacturer based in Italy with a new facility in Olean, New York] and shipped in four large sections across the Atlantic aboard the vessel Aralia. The ship then traveled up the Hudson River to the Port of Coeymans. Carver then offloaded the bridge sections and placed them onto two 195-foot-long barges. What happened next was in some ways historic, as the barges and their loads entered the famous Erie Canal and slowly traversed the 34-lock system. According to a Carver release outlining the effort, a four-person crew was deployed in a “tandem tow — one tug (CMT Otter) towing two hopper barges (CMT Kelly and CMT Hofmann) — for the majority of the 370-nautical-mile trip, executing single-tow maneuvers only when necessary to navigate tight turns on the route.” It was a difficult voyage to make as the air-draft clearance [only allowed for three inches at a time] for the bridges over the canal and the sharp turns and width of the canal along with the controlling depth, under keel clearance only allowed for 12 inch at times and was restrictive. But the effort moving through the Erie was appreciated as crowds gathered to see the barges and tug transiting the canal for the first time in over 50 years all the way to Buffalo. As Kelly said of the job, “We were happy, it was very well received with the locals up on the Erie Canal. They hadn’t seen industry using the Erie Canal…in quite some time.”
And Carver has another big job coming up. The Livingston Avenue Bridge in Albany is also being replaced. The Livingston Avenue Bridge spans the Hudson River connecting the cities of Albany and Rensselaer, New York and just like the Portal North Bridge, it is another railway span. As a part of the rail network, this project is located on the Empire Corridor. The Empire Corridor is one of eleven federally designated High Speed Rail Corridors in the US. And the Livingston Avenue Bridge is located on the Hudson Line Section of the Empire Corridor and is the only upstate passenger rail crossing of the Hudson River.
