The railroad turned Croton-on-Hudson into a riverside idyll. But some can’t live with the noise of idling locomotives.
A lawsuit by neighbors driven to distraction by late night noise from the Harmon yard is working its way through state court. The railroad counters that it has no choice.
Laurie Hollar lives in Ossining, just across the Croton River from the village of Croton-on-Hudson. She moved into her home in July 2017. At first, everything seemed calm and quiet. But one night in April 2020, “shockingly loud noise awoke me. Once awake, I noticed a constant, debilitating humming noise, which prevented me from falling back asleep, and continued through the night and into the next day.”
These quotes are taken from an affidavit that Hollar wrote last year for a lawsuit in New York state court against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Metro North Commuter Railroad Company, and are used with her permission. The basic premise of the lawsuit is that the railroad’s operations in the Harmon Yard in Croton are creating so much noise that her health, physical and mental, is being seriously affected.
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