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
ex-LACKAWANNA
Notable Abandoned Sections:
Possible Reactivations:
Before NJT took over the trackage rights it was owed by Conrail.
tpatrick 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.
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.
tpatrickIt 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.
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.
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
http://chatanuga.org/RailPage.html
http://chatanuga.org/WLMR.html
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
tpatrick . 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.
. 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.
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?
MerrilyWeRollAlongPort Jervis to Suffern, NY via Old Main Line (Metro-North RR w/ NS trackage rights)
MerrilyWeRollAlong Lackawanna Cut-Off to reestablish thru passenger service between New York and Scranton and possiblity all the way to Binghamton.
My Model Railroad: Tri State RailMy Photos on Flickr: FlickrMy Videos on Youtube: YoutubeMy Photos on RRPA: RR Picture Archives
Convicted One tpatrick . 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. 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?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
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
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.
Murphy Siding Convicted One tpatrick . 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. 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 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.
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 time that they don't end up doing.
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.
Redwards 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
Falcon48Murphy Siding Convicted One tpatrick . 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. 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 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. 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 time that they don't end up doing.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
oltmanndFalcon48 Murphy Siding Convicted One tpatrick . 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. 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 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. 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 time that they don't end up doing. Correct! You make money in railroading by concentrating traffic on the best routes. For Conrail, the best route for their traffic base that included the former EL traffic was the River Line and Chicago Line. There are really two things that made it better than the EL route. One is grades. Grades cost fuel and/or time. EL ran their 3-4000 ton van trains with 3 SD45s. That's roughly 3 HP/ton. Conrail ran theirs with 1.75 HP/ton. The second is on-line traffic of all kinds. Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo beat Scranton, Binghamton, Corning and Hornell, hands down. The real question is why Conrail didn't abandon the EL in the southern tier of NY. The answer is a combination of a contractual obligation to NY to run 3 trains a day on the Tier and not wanting NS to be able to improve their reach into the metro NYC area by owning the route. NY would get very grouchy when Conrail would start to slack off on the number of trains operated. They thought it was key to keeping the Tier economically healthy. (Never mind the state did a bang-up job of driving off most heavy industry in the state with taxation...) I know it is a hard thing for the EL fans to swallow that their favorite railroad really wasn't needed anymore, but it wasn't!
Falcon48 Murphy Siding Convicted One tpatrick . 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. 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 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. 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 time that they don't end up doing.
Can't vouch for the truth of the story but I did hear for a time Conrail met their 3 trains a day contractual obligation by running dedicated sets of empty cars. Don't know if it would be considered a unit train.
I lived in and around Binghamton during Conrail and the Southern Tier line was a regular news item. The tidbit that stuck with me was that the line was only kept open for legal reasons. New York State did not want this line to totally disapper like all the NYO&W lines had done further east and north. It was also noted that most of this line was overgrown, "excepted" track which was only maintained enough to allow a regular service at no faster than 10 MPH. The manifest was not a concern: the line must remain in use. I believe in the mid-1990s the track and railbed were almost completely replaced using a combination of state funds and really low-interest state loans.
Our friend "henry6" has great knowledge of this area's railroads.
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