Have these odds and ends Pics that perhaps you may enjoy or are worthy of discussion.
Ahhhh, Shot Two! One of the Jersey Central’s big beefy Mikados!
They didn’t save none of them neither! Dammit.
Still, a nice shot of the Communipaw Engine Terminal, with New York City in the background. Now Communipaw’s gone like it was never there. [:'(]
Communipaw is gone? See I didn’t know that. Thought it was one of those important strategic locations that would live forever. Nice notice on the City Skyline in the background. Heck of a big engine. Huge tender! With all Diesel assassins lurking about its days are numbered for sure.
Sorry to hear the Terminal is gone and wouldn’t it be nice if they kept that Mikado.
Nothing looks tougher than an anthracite road Consol or Mikado with a Wootten firebox.
Yeah Vince, to make a long story short when Conrail came about and the Jersey Central was folded into same the Jersey City terminal, freight yards, and Communipaw engine terminal and shops weren’t needed anymore, and were demolished in the 1980’s.
The old CNJ passenger terminal survives as Liberty State Park, but everything else is, to use a Lucius Beebe phrase, “Gone with the snows of yesteryear…”
Like it was never there.
i’m sure I lined this video clip before, but for those who haven’t seen it, here’s an excerpt from the Jersey Central promotional film of 1949 " The Big Little Railroad."
And again, everything you see in the Jersey City terminal area is gone. Staggering really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kYeg5A6jBE
PS: I couldn’t help but notice that YouTube says “Comments are disabled for this video.” No surprise, considering there’s a lot of railfans in New Jersey and some of them are pretty intense there was probably a lot of profanity involved! The old CNJ had a lot of fans!
Check out that before and after picture 2nd and 3rd down!
Oh yeah, those “before and after” shots!
It’s stunning how something like the Jersey Central terminal area can disappear so completely, isn’t it?
All that hard work that went into building it. Lost. What a shame.
That double Roundhouse in the background …just gone and all that yard trackage. What a whammy.
So all those railcars have been replaced by trucking?
Thanks for building New York and surrounding areas, winning the war for us and building our economy, now GET LOST!
The eradication of the CNJ’s landmarks gets even worse.
Here’s the story of the CNJ’s Newark Bay Drawbrige, an engineering marvel. When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wanted it gone it was doomed. Not a trace remains.
Here’s the story, and the photo really doesn’t do it justice, it was a colossus!
It’s funny how small the Elizabethport Shops actually were. It’s interesting how some larger railroads had relatively small shops while smaller ones had huge (for their size) ones. US Steel roads had large backshops, along with the anthracite roads while NKP Conneaut didn’t seem to be large at all.
It can be worse. At least C’paw was obsolescent by the '70s. You couldn’t really say that about Orangeville, which in my memory was alive with locomotives. And now…
Flintlock/Wayne – Are you sure we won the war?
Jersey City
https://ia800906.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/10/items/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_jp2.zip&file=newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_jp2/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_0314.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0
https://ia800906.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/10/items/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_jp2.zip&file=newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_jp2/newjerseyaguide00fedemiss_0306.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0
Mind boggling … that’s a long way from originally trading with the Native folks
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:wd3767420
Oh, we won the war all right, but it’s amazing how fast the tools that made victory possible disappeared when they weren’t needed anymore. Ships, tanks, planes, steam locomotives, and eventually a lot of railroads themselves that dieselizing couldn’t save.
Check this depressing stuff out…
https://www.airplaneboneyards.com/post-wwii-long-term-aircraft-storage-sites.htm
Now I’m not saying all of those warplanes should have been saved, that would have been totally impractical, but the preservation of a goodly number of them should have been attempted instead of wholesale junking.
I don’t know, I wasn’t there, what do I know? Maybe all everyone wanted to do was get the war behind them as soon as possible and get on with their lives. Can’t blame them for that.
By the way, several years ago I read an article in “Air Classics” magazine written by a former USAAF pilot who ferried fighter planes to the boneyard. P-39’s, P-40’s, P-47’s, you name it, and when he got to the boneyard it was always “Park it over there,” or “Park it over here,” no-one asked him to sign a delivery voucher, or sign any paperwork whatsoever. It was always “Park it…”
Afterwards he’d hop a ferry flight back to where the planes were being returned from overseas and pick up another one, then start the wole process over.
“Geez!” he said in the article, “I could have flown one or more of those planes to my parents farm, stuck 'em in one of the barns, and no-one would have been the wiser!”
But they were ridiculously obsolete for most military purposes, expensive to maintain and run, and not the kind of thing a person would want in his yard as a memorial. The thing’s been said far more powerfully than anything I could possibly indicate here … the personal side, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpGNKO6wz10
Prefabricated houses, bigger jets, the TurboTrain … those were the way of the future. And that was only 1946, when steam still had a bright future on American railroads…
I do know of at least one company that tried to make ‘civilian’ use of these aircraft: the On Mark company with A-26s. Some of the engineering changes used to accomplish the conversion were ingenious. Didn’t appear to help. But the results were spectacular…
FYI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpGNKO6wz10
The CHAIN DRIVE Mack Truck w the crane would be a Classic these days.
Thank You.
No doubt!
Mod-man, I know just what you’re saying. All true. Still, it’s a shame nonetheless.
Have you ever heard of the original ending to that sequence in “The Best Years Of Our Lives”? I forget where I read or heard this, maybe in a “Great Movies” type magazine, maybe on Turner Classic Movies, but purportedly the sequence originally ended with Dana Andrews committing suicide in the the nose of the B-17. If you’ve seen the movie you know his whole life’s come totally apart by that point.
Anyway, in several “sneak previews” the audience had such a bad reaction to it, it “Stopped the picture COLD!” to use a Hollywood phrase, the sequence was re-shot and the ending we see in the clip was substituted.
Is is true? Maybe.
More pics for possible discussion
