The BelDel could have been as important as the Port Road on the Susquehanna if significant New England bridge traffic from the L&HR and L&NE and southbound Lackawanna traffic interchanged at the Delaware Water Gap. Had the history of the Reading Combine (and Morgan crashing the whole economy while doing Archie McLeod in) been different…
The EP-5s were built with third-rail shoes!
It’s 37 years since the wife and I left New Jersey for Virginia. VA’s a good place to live and we’re not sorry but you’re oh so right:
You can take the kids out of Jersey but you can’t take the Jersey out of the kids!
And that being said:
And it’s still there, now it’s NJ Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line, a major commuter hauler.
Here’s a Liberty Railfan video of the Coast Line at Red Bank.
Complete, at last, with views of the places. It’s not a state, it’s a state of mind, that state of mine.
Special note to Ringoes and Tenafly… and is that the Azalea I see?
(EDIT: no, it’s not. The pottery studio had it lettered ‘Susquehanna’ (and everyone referred to it as a ‘Pullman’ car) but since I can’t access RyPN, I can’t ask the heavyweight brain trust of serious preservationists what it is.
Oh my, thanks so much for that! NJ’s a LOT more than the Turnpike and the Chemical Coast!
I’ve created a fictional railroad, and I’ve currently got a route planned for it, And some General Lore. The NorthEastern System began it’s roots as a merger between Erie Lackawanna, and the fictional Pittsburgh and Syracuse. The P&S preformed large amounts of electrification, and after the merger with the EL, Beat Amtrak to the punch at buying the PRR’s electrified routes and connecting their wires (EL formed a few years earlier in this timeline) The newly formed merger connected Boston to DC, and most of upstate New York Pennsylvania (With PC Competition albeit) and New Jersey. After that, they set their sites on the Boston and Maine, which they merged in with Ease, The railroad had kept alive by this point by using Fast TOFC trains on it’s electrified network, which was still in stellar condition due to the NE’s realization that you actually have to take care of your tracks and equipment, like the purchase E-60s of both types at this point to replace P&S and Ex-PRR GG1s, and Boxcabs from the NH and NYC. The NE also arranged special agreements with shippers like UPS to put priority packages on it’s passenger trains, which likely saved their passenger operations. In the 90’s the railroad was doing quite well for the next merger round, and on January 1st, 1991, Would absorb the GT, CV, and Maine Central (Guilford/Pan Am would never exist) And that’s the NE’s current state, Using primarily rebuilt GE electrics from the 60s, Like the E60F-2, E44-2’s and 3’s E33-2’s and 3’s, E25B-2’s, E50s and EMD GF6Cs, with ACS-64’s and a limited amount of AEM-7s for passenger service on electric territory. On Diesel routes, A large amount of GP and SD60Ms, As well as GP60-2Fs, and a lot of older power, Which is slowly being rebuilt and/or replaced with SD70MACs and ACEs.
Sounds like a great story, Bigguy511. Got pics?
The trope in New Jersey Magazine was that we built a corridor of Mordor, many lanes wide, to shuttle people through the middle of the state quickly so they’d never figure out the delights of the rest. It is not the ‘Garden State’ because of tank farms…
Why did you not order GM10Bs? They were many times better than GM6C or derivatives unless you had need for parts commonality with SD40s…
“Money Money Money” - ABBA
They also share parts with our older EMDs which is a nice thing, as we have a lot of specialized SD40s that can run on power supplied from an electric using an inverter located near the fuel tank.
Cheap U25Bs in the early 2000s?
We ended up Buying some new, and bought some used ones when they were cheap.
That’s not the best place for it:
https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/15203/PB81191314[1].pdf
https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/10599
(The revised version with an early S.580 cab and better pantograph location is pictured in Part 4 of the report, which nominally concerns wayside storage, something else likely to be of interest to your backstory…)
https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/8794
Modern version (incorporating Michael Iden’s version) as of January 2025, as provided by Firecrown:
Ah, I see! Kind of like that t-shirt I had years ago that (ahem) shrunk:
“Welcome to New Jersey! Now go home!”
Mine (admittedly from Northern New Jersey) read in large letters “Welcome to New Jersey” and then in smaller letters ‘Nothing to see here. Return to your homes.’
What a fascinating subject for discussion! Now retired from decades as a professional in the field of history, I’ve learned a thing or two about how history can be written, and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten ad infinitum.
That served me well when I decided decades ago, to build a freelance pike whose story might seem well grounded in plausible history. Or at least, up to a point. It’s not like I’m writing my railroad’s history for peer-reviewed publication, after all.
My railroad is the Great Lakes & Hudson’s River RR [GLHR]. It got that name because I wanted to say something about the points of origin of myself and my spouse. That’s really all I needed, to begin building a railroad and a story to go with it. It doesn’t need to mean anything to anyone but me. But that last sentence is loaded with wiggle room.
As my idea for the Great Lakes grew, so did a couple of other things. My knowledge of American railroad history served as a foundation, allowing me to do what literally every Class I railroad did, picking up pieces of previously existing railroads along my way (literally) from New York City to Petoskey, MI. In my backstory, I amalgamated the Erie and the DLW decades before anyone else did. But I kept their reporting marks on some rolling stock, as divisions of the GLHR. To me, it just adds interest, and doing that is perfectly plausible as historic railroads did that right and left. GLHR also snapped up the Pere Marquette before the C&O got its hands on it. It operates as another GLHR division, and gives me a reason to add “Pere Marquette Railway” to the top of some steam loco tenders while they carry GLHR reporting marks and numbering. There are a number of freight cars where you can still read the faded PM marks under the GLHR patches, as is also the case with a few former DLW and Erie cars. A few of them are still awaiting new paint jobs too.
I’m competing with giants like the NYC and PRR, so its logical and plausible that they make occasional appearances near my GLHR, including, without reference to plausibility, at the massive Union Station that serves as GLHR’s HQ building.
The fact is, that while we sometimes think of our historic railroads as having had an orderly existence, they were always all a mess, as they remain today, reminding some of us of a seething ball of worms. There’s no reason to think our own railroads can’t or shouldn’t reflect that turbulent history and evolution in the way we build our pikes and mark our engines and other rolling stock. It’s kind of okay, to explain something with a convoluted history with some of the convolutions quite apparent. Goodness knows that is a historical accuracy of nationwide proportions!
“Great Lakes & Hudson River.” That sounds so good because it’s so plausible!
An interesting “might-have-been” indeed!
