It was a short train ride to the New Jersey docks at Weehawken, and a harbor boat ferried troops to a waiting troopship. One source also advised that other troops marched the four miles from the camp to the Piermont Pier, where they boarded troopships. (Piermont Pier was originally the terminus for a ferry that took New York City – bound train travelers across the river to pick up the train again in Dobbs Ferry before completing their journey to the city. Before that, the mile-long pier was originally built to enable the freight cars of the Erie Railroad to load and unload onto steam boats which plied the Hudson River between Albany and New York City in the mid-eighteenth century. During the war, the pier was taken over by the U.S. Government, extended and improved, and used as a principal embarkation point of soldiers heading to Europe. 40,000 U.S. troops per month, including many Hudson Valley residents, passed across the pier where ships were able to dock in deep water. Piermont became known as the "Last Stop USA." After the war was won, over half a million men returned home across the same pier, first setting foot back in the U.S. out in the middle of the Hudson River at the end of the pier.)