I am just curious, I read that Erie Lackawanna provided excellent intermodal service. After the railroads tracks were severely destroyed after a hurricane and the company absorbed into Conrail; I am curious to wonder why the line was not kept up by a Class I railroad for intermodal service.
Most of it is still in service. Western New York and Pennsylvania operates form Meadville through Jamestown and Olean, continuing eastward to Hornell. The NS Southern Tier Line from Buffalo connects with WNYP at Hornell and continues to the east over the old Erie main.
WNYP hosts a steady stream of NS coal traffic, loads east and empties west, while operating its own growing local service. In addition, WNYP operates the former PRR line south of Olean over Keating Summit to Driftwood, PA, where it interchanges with NS and BPRR. Service north of Olean terminates at Machias.
Finally there is the Oil City branch of WNYP which contributes loads to interchange at Meadville.
WNYP rosters Alcos of the four and six axle variety, so if you like something different in motive power this is the place to visit. Unfortunately trains run on an as needed basis, so there is no formal schedule, with many trains after dark. Still, a dedicated fan should be able to find some action on his visit.
Regarding your question about intermodal, it would seem the Erie, having wider clearances would be ideal for that service. It has been rumored that Conrail preferred to put its money into the former NYC and PRR main lines. For Conrail EL was excess. Even worse, EL could have been a strong competitor to Conrail if it fell into another railroad’s hands. Thus the effort by Conrail to remove EL from service and scrap as much as possible. Fortunately enough survived to live another day.
Additionally, a lot of the lines east of Buffalo are still in service although they have varying degrees of activity. Notable portions are listed below:
ex-ERIE
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Buffalo to Binghamton (Norfolk Southern)
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Binghamton to Port Jervis (NYS&W’s Central New York RR w/ NS trackage rights)
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Port Jervis to Suffern, NY via Old Main Line (Metro-North RR w/ NS trackage rights)
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Suffern to Secaucus, NJ (New Jersey Transit w/ NS trackage rights)
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Spring Valley, NY to Hoboken (NJT/Metro-North w/ NS trackage rights)
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Monclair, NJ to Mountain View, NJ (NJT w/ NS trackage rights)
ex-LACKAWANNA
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Hoboken to Denville, NJ (NJT w/ NS trackage rights)
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Hoboken to Montclair, NJ (NJT w/ NS trackage rights)
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Summit, NJ to Gladstone, NJ (NJT w/ NS trackage rights)
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Mountain View, NJ to Hackettstown, NJ (NJT w/ NS trackage rights)
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Hackettstown, NJ to Phillipsburg, NJ (Norfolk Southern)
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Scranton to Portland, PA via Delaware Water Gap (Delaware-Lackawanna RR)
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Scranton to Binghamtom (Canadian Pacific/D&H)
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Binghamton to Syracuse (New York, Susquanna & Western)
Notable Abandoned Sections:
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Lackawanna’s Lackawanna Cutoff between Port Morris and the Delaware Water Gap
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Most of Lackawanna’s lines west of Binghamton
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Lackawan
Before NJT took over the trackage rights it was owed by Conrail.[C=:-)]
Not quite. In the first plan for Conrail, most of the former EL mains east of Ohio and into metro New York would have been turned over to Chessie. However, Chessie could not negotiate new labor contracts for the lines in question so the option was declined, leaving the former EL lines as part of a “big” Conrail.
Wasn’t the EL also a last-minute addition into the Conrail merger, hence why more focus had been put on the former NYC and PRR routes?
Kevin
The EL was considered to be able to keep operating on its own even when Conrail was coming to be…but the storms and slightly lower carloadings put an end to that. The problem was that they needed help to repair the lines but apparently that money would come only if they became part of Conrail.
It’s interesting to think that if they had survived they might have had a jump on the intermodal market since they did have the clearances. A lot of the lines are left but pretty much scattered.
I suggest you get Mike Walker’s “Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America”, the ‘Northeast’ volume. They are available from Kalmbach, Carstens, and SPV (the publisher in England) and cost about $25. Super cool, and maybe more than you want to know, and you can easily see what happend to the Erie and the DL&W, like why Goshen, NY is no longer serviced and why Middletown, NY soon will be berift of railway service. When the DL&W and Erie merged, the, for the most part, best lines were preserved, in New York State. Erie, having been built as a 6’-0" line, had better clearances and a lot of parallel DL&W trackage was redundant. Of course, the old Erie has been reduced to single-main, the lovely semaphore signals scrapped, and doesn’t get much traffic from Norfolk Southern, its current owner. NYS&W (“The Susquehana”) has trackage rights on a lot of it. Things might change, with the NS-Pan Am Railways deal, sending traffic to/from eastern New England. Stay tuned!
Hays
So you are saying that there was a “strategic” abandonment designed to prevent potential competitors from getting ahold of enough continuous parallel route to pose competition?
I thought that knowledgable sources said this was impossible in another thread?
Other way around. NS owns the Southern Tier and Metro-North has trackage rights, although NJ Transit actually operates the service.
The Cutoff between Lake Hopatcong and Andover has basically already begun. Contracts have been awarded for this 8 mile section, and construction will commence within the next few months.
There is no date for service between Andover and Scranton; they are just concerned about Phase I at the moment.
I see this as something of a re-occuring conspiracy theory about railroads. It’s similar to the one about The Milwaukee Road Pacific Coast Extention being a great money-maker with a bright future, until the bad guys did it in.
Other than the fact that Conrail chose the PC lines to save over the EL lines, is there any substance to the idea that it was done to keep another line from taking this one over and competing with CR? What I’ve read, is that the USRA was desperate to get a line into the Port of New York that could be shown as providing competion to CR, in order to placate congress and the shippers. It seems odd, that they could overlook EL, if it was indeed what some say it was.
Aside from the Chessie proposal mentioned, I’m not aware of any other serious proposals on the table that would have kept the ex-EL lines out of Conrail. H. Roger Grant’s book “Erie-Lackawanna; Death of an American Railroad” does cite a study done by managers at the Santa Fe that looked at acquiring the EL in order to create a transcontinental intermodal conduit. I don’t have the book in front of me so I can’t quote the specifics but you can imagine the hurdles the Santa Fe would have had to have overcome to execute that plan.
A few years back there was an excellent thread on another forum about Conrail’s track rationalization strategy. One of the thread participants had (or claimed to have) first hand knowledge of actions taken by Conrail management to protect their franchise that kept potentially interested parties from acquiring some ex-EL trackage. I apologize for linking to another forum, but if you’re interested I think it’s best to read the account first-hand vs. me trying to paraphrase:
http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=15615&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
–Reed
Could NS or CSX rebuild the original route with a partnership with the shortlines? Like the NS-Pan Am deal. Get through traffic off I-80 in PA.
In Harriman, it’s the Main Line that is abandoned between Harriman and Middletown. It was swiftly turned into a bike path that starts just west of Monroe.
The Graham Line (freight cut-off), if that’s the name of the line that runs over Moodna Viaduct, is actually the Metro-North Port Jervis line until Port Jervis.
There is also a much older line abandoned several decades before Metro-North that runs through Washingtonville but I have not been able to discover its name.
As I mentioned in another thread, I have a lot of experience with rail abandonments, and “conspiracy” theories like this do not ring true. If a railroad is really concerned about a competitor acquiring one of its lines, it doesn’t abandon the line. Without repeating everything I said before, let me just ask one question. Is there any basis for believe that anyone was really serious about buying this line? Just because Santa Fe may have “looked” at it doesn’t mean they were serious about it. I know for a fact that C&NW “looked” at buying Con Rail, but they never took any significant steps to do so. Railroads “look” at things all the
From what I’ve read, this is mostly just a case built on what if? and if only type logic. I read through the link posted above by Redward. Even the info there seems to back that up. Excerpts from H. Roger Grant’s book Erie-Lackawanna; Death of an American Railroad seem to say that the EL would have been saved IF a few things had happened differently.
For those few things to happen differently, some serious use of a crystal ball would have been required. Railroads would have had to be able to see the future down the road 5 or 10 years. They would have had to spend money they didn’t have, for traffic they didn’t have, based on deregulation and container traffic they did not know was in the future. I’d think any manager who did it at the time would have been pitched out the door in a heartbeat.
If we’re going to say they made the wrong decisions, don’t we have to base it on what they knew at the time, not what we now know?
Just to be clear here - when I wrote the Grant reference to the Santa Fe study I tried to take pains to underscore that it was merely an interesting footnote to the discussion. If anyone has inferred that I presented it as an example of a “serious” bid to save the EL that was not my intention.
–Reed
I didn’t take it that way, and I doubt that anyone else did either. From time to time, the subject comes up of whether Conrail blocked another railroad from getting the EL, in order to compete with Conrail. I wonder how serious the Santa Fe was anyway.
[quote user=“Falcon48”]
As I mentioned in another thread, I have a lot of experience with rail abandonments, and “conspiracy” theories like this do not ring true. If a railroad is really concerned about a competitor acquiring one of its lines, it doesn’t abandon the line. Without repeating everything I said before, let me just ask one question. Is there any basis for believe that anyone was really serious about buying this line? Just because Santa Fe may have “looked” at it doesn’t mean they were serious about it. I know for a fact that C&NW “looked” at buying Con Rail, but they never took any significant steps to do so. Railroads “look” at things all t
[quote user=“oltmannd”]
[quote user=“Falcon48”]
As I mentioned in another thread, I have a lot of experience with rail abandonments, and “conspiracy” theories like this do not ring true. If a railroad is really concerned about a competitor acquiring one of its lines, it doesn’t abandon the line. Without repeating everything I said before, let me just ask one question. Is there any basis for believe that anyone was really serious about buying this line? Just because Santa Fe may have “looked” at it doesn’t mean they were serious about it. I know for a fact that C&NW “looked” at buying Con Rail, but they never took any