Grassroots Railroad Sports?

An Erie-Lackawanna piggyback train with a classic EMD covered wagon and an SD45-2 crossing the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct on October 28th, 1974.

An SDP45 and an SD45-2 crossing Tunkhannock Creek at Nicholson, PA on the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct.

The Delaware & Hudson ended up with Tunkhannock, and the rest of the DL&W main line from Scranton to Binghamton, as part of a deal with Conrail in 1980. D&H was moving a lot of traffic to Binghamton, and beyond to Buffalo, and also up out of Potomac Yard in Alexandria, VA, and was having to move it all over their Penn Division, their line from Nineveh Junction to Scranton, and then head west from Nineveh Junction to Binghamton. While the D&H Penn Division was certainly scenic, it was also torturously routed and slow, as well as having a brutal grade over Mount Ararat that required helpers in both directions. It was not a fast or efficient or profitable way to run trains.

At the same time, Conrail was looking at getting rid of the old DL&W mainline. They had ended up with multiple mainlines to Buffalo (the Erie's line across the Southern Tier, the DL&W's main line, the Lehigh Valley mainline, and both New York Central's Water Level Route and the old West Shore) and were looking to cull most of them. The New York Central line was hands-down the best, and the state of New York was paying Conrail to keep using the Southern Tier line and keep servicing customers and communities in that region and it also had the advantage of huge clearances that accomodated dimensional extras with ease. The West Shore was pretty superfluous, since it mirrored the Water Level Route, and so that was a goner. Nobody wanted to touch the Lehigh Valley's line with a ten-foot pole since, on top of it's dreadful routing and terrible condition, the LV had poisoned the wells in the community of Leroy, NY with trichloroethylene from a derailment. Leroy had sued the LV, but the LV was beyond broke, and so everyone was afraid that if they took ownership of that line, they'd end up paying for reparations and remediation. The DL&W line was short and relatively flat, but lacked on-line customers and also had some size restrictions through Belden Tunnel. 

For Conrail to abandon the DL&W at that point in time, the Staggers Act hadn't passed just yet, would have required loads of hearings, and the few on-line customers likely would have fought against total abandonment. But the D&H wanted a better line from Scranton to Binghamton, and the DL&W line was loads better than the Penn Division. It was a win-win for both: Conrail got rid of a line that they didn't need and didn't want to pay taxes on, the D&H got a more direct route from Scranton to Binghamton. The sale was made and the D&H downgraded their Penn Division to just handling occasional oversize loads.

As double-stack and auto-rack trains became more common, Belden Tunnel on the ex-DL&W mainline became an issue, as it lacked the height to accommodate these larger cars. In 1985, the D&H launched a rebuilding of Belden Tunnel to make it large enough to handle these cars. This resulted in a brief reactivation of the D&H Penn Division, with trains leaving Scranton, running backwards with power on both ends. They'd run north on the Penn Division to Lanesboro, PA, climb the steep connecting ramp track at Jefferson Junction, dump the power on the rear, and then run forwards on the ex-Erie Southern Tier line to Binghamton. After 6-8 months of work on Belden Tunnel, they resumed running on the ex-DL&W mainline, and since that could now handle larger loads, they completely abandoned the D&H Penn Division.

One of the "puller jobs" dragging a northbound train past Starrucca Viaduct in Lanesboro, PA. They'll continue up to Jefferson Junction, change directions and head onto the Erie to Binghamton. Despite being a D&H train, the motive power on the tail end lacks a single D&H locomotive. There's three Maine Central GE U25Bs and a pair of Boston & Maine GEs as well. Of course, in 1985, the D&H was owned by Guilford Rail Systems, who also owned the Maine Central and B&M, and the D&H was perennially power-short, so it makes sense that power from sister Guilford lines would appear. Also interesting is that those Harvest Gold MEC U25Bs are actually ex-Rock Island, picked up by the Maine Central during The Rock's liquidation a few years before.

A D&H train headed northbound on the old Penn Division shortly before the Belden Hill Tunnel project was completed and this line fell permanently silent. D&H had been handling coal trains in conjunction with the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie that went to the Mount Tom power plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts and the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow, New Hampshire. P&LE would bring the coal in from the Monongahela coal fields and deliver it to Buffalo, then D&H would run over Conrail's ex-Erie Southern Tier Line and grab it from Buffalo and bring it east to Mechanicville and hand it off to B&M, who would bring it to either power plant. Since the D&H was short on power, sometimes the P&LE continued onwards from Buffalo all the way to Mechanicville, like is shown here. 

Around the same time, NS was trying to make moves on buying out Conrail, and so the P&LE wanted to acquire the former Meadville Line and then the Southern Tier from Hornell to Binghamton from Conrail, and they also had designs about running all the way to Croxton Yard in NJ. Their main goal was to deliver coal from the Monongahela to the D&H at Binghamton, and then the D&H and B&M would take the coal right to Mt. Tom and Bow, avoiding a middleman and trackage rights. The D&H also would have given them reach as far south as Potomac Yard in Alexandria, VA. Apparently CR was willing to sell it, and Norfolk Southern was going to hand them a line to St. Louis, although it would have been the absolutely wretched ex-Nickel Plate "Cloverleaf Line", and talks began, but there was a pretty complicated web of financing that the P&LE was leveraging to make the sale happen, and Conrail got scared off by it. It was a moot point because while P&LE was arranging financing, they were busy going bankrupt, and ended up being engulfed by CSX in 1993.

D&H GP39-2s race under Starrucca Viaduct, just one year before D&H acquired the DL&W mainline and relegated the Penn Division to a secondary line.

A Conrail freight heads over Starrucca Viaduct with symbol freight BUOI (Buffalo-Oak Island) with shiny SD50s in the lead.

A mix of Conrail 4-axle power (A B23-7, a GP30, a GP40, and I believe a GP35) cross the D&H Penn Division in 1983. You can see by the amount of grass grown up through the tracks just how little traffic the D&H Penn Division was seeing at this point.

Freshly arrived from Conrail, GE U33C #653 is paired up with some Boston & Maine EMD power for a northbound "detour" train headed under Starrucca. The original D&H #653 was a rather European-styled 4-6-2 with 325psi boiler pressure and unusual Dabeg rotary cam poppet valve valve gear.

D&H #18, the Alco PA that recently returned to Scranton, under the Starrucca Viaduct with a railfan excursion in October of 1974. While the #18 is back in the area now, these rails are long gone, so no hopes of recreating this shot.

N&W power at Lanesboro, leading a D&H train. Since N&W ended up with control of E-L and the D&H in 1968, the D&H frequently leased N&W motive power to get by.

Lehigh Valley run-through power at Lanesboro on the Penn Division.

One of the 1985 detour trains, with a unit painted in the "Big G" livery in the lead.

While Starrucca Viaduct isn't as big as nearby Tunkhannock, it is significantly older. Completed in 1848 at a cost of $320,000 (equal to $10,823,385 today), it was at the time the world's largest stone railway viaduct and was thought to be the most expensive railway bridge as well. Constructed by the Erie, it originally only had a single broad-gauge (6') track, but was converted to double-track when the Erie was standard-gauged in 1886. After completion is has been continuously operated ever since, first under the Erie, then the Erie-Lackawanna, then Conrail, then Norfolk Southern got it when Conrail was split in 1999, and then in 2005, Norfolk Southern leased the old Erie Southern Tier Line, including Starrucca Viaduct, to the Delaware-Otsego Corp., the owners/operators of the New York Susquehanna & Western.

A set of F-units are acting as a helper pair at Starrucca Viaduct. The Viaduct is on the 1.8% grade to Gulf Summit, and was a helper district for the Erie. In fact, this was where that fascinating 0-8-8-0 Camelback, and the Triplexes, were based. I'm curious why there is a baggage car cut in ahead of the caboose on the tail end of a freight train.

Four of the New York, Susquehanna & Western's GE B40-8s lead a Sealand stack train over Starrucca Viaduct. Those B40-8s were the pride of the NYS&W fleet when they arrived, and CSX financed an additional batch of them for the NYS&W to use when the NYS&W took over as the D&H's directed service operator, following it's bankruptcy. My book on the later years tells an amusing story about the NYS&W becoming the directed-service operator in '88. There had long been a close friendship between railfan/lawyer/railroad president Walter Rich at Delware-Otsego and the D&H's management. When Tim Mellon at Guilford announced they were casting the D&H into bankruptcy, they immediately called Walter Rich and said "What do we do?" He then proceeded to tell them "Okay, you need to start the process. Call this judge, tell him that you have enough payroll for three days and then you're bankrupt. You'll need a trustee, they'll appoint one, but it's easier if you have one in mind, tell them you want so-and-so, he's really good. You'll also need a directed service operator, again, they'll pick one, but it's quicker if you choose him. So tell him 'Walter Rich at Delaware-Otsego would LOVE to be the directed service operator." So they hung up, made all the phone calls, and when they asked if they had a directed service operator in mind, they said "Well, Walter Rich said he'd be happy to take it on." The judge immediately started laughing and said "I bet he did." When NYS&W took over running the D&H while the court tried to find a new owner, Walter Rich was insistent that every D&H train have an NYS&W "yellow jacket" in the lead, because he wanted people to associate the D&H with the Suzie-Q, because he hoped to end up with the D&H permanently. Those who worked at Delaware-Otsego said that he had also spoken to GE and was ready to order another big order of B40-8s if he got the D&H, and that they were to be painted in D&H lightning stripe. Sadly, he lacked the financial horsepower to win the fight for the D&H, and NS and CSX cut a deal with him to stay out of that fight and let CPRail get the D&H.

A terrific Marc Glucksman photo of a rare daylight running of NYS&W train SU-99. Typically the northbound SU-99 and southbound SU-100 run extremely early in the morning and extremely late at night, under cover of darkness, but delays caused it to be running in broad daylight. Also particularly neat is that it has the three recently repainted SD70M-2s, in the throwback livery with the Susquehanna lettering on the nose, and the SD40-2 heritage unit in the original silver and maroon livery.

E. Bennett Levin's two PRR E8As crossing Starrucca Viaduct with a Toys For Tots train, which I believe was the very last time that those E8s were out and about before they were parked due to lack of PTC. Theoretically they could be retrofitted, but Levin is focusing his efforts on getting PRR #1361 up and running these days.

N&W #611 made the move down to Virginia last weekend, and I'm pretty sure that I guessed right on where it is going. For a couple days, searching "611 Steam Train" pulled up an incomplete webpage with the Buckingham Branch/Virginia Scenic Railway heading on it. The website has since vanished, likely because other people had found it as well, and there hasn't been an official announcement. That should be a nice place for her to run, with some longer trips to stretch her legs.

Holy cow, Adirondack Railroad announced their list of services for this year, and the options are almost overwhelming. In previous years, there was the big run from Utica north to Thendara (the old northern terminus), with and without a layover at Thendara, and then the short local run from Thendara south to Otter Lake and back. During the off-season, they just ran from Utica to Remsen (about halfway up to Thendara, roughly) and back for special events.

Now there's trips from Utica to Tupper Lake (the new northern terminus), where you can get off at Thendara and stay there with a layover or continue on to Tupper Lake with no layover at Tupper Lake, or you can board at Thendara and ride to Tupper Lake and back. There's a Thendara-Tupper Lake run with a 4.5 hour layover in Tupper Lake (no clue what you'd do in Tupper Lake for 4.5 hours). There's a Thendara-Big Moose run (Big Moose is north of Thendara), a Thendara-Otter Lake run, and a Tupper Lake-Sabattis (Sabattis is south of Tupper, north of Thendara and Big Moose) run. No clue how they're going to handle all those with the motive power that they have (the two RS-18us, the C424 and the M420W are all runners, an SW-1 they use for MoW, and  they have an RS-3 and an S-1 they've been tinkering with but don't have in service), unless they're borrowing power from the MA&N, it's also almost all single-track all the way with few passing sidings, and they'd be stretching crews thin. The only logical thing is that they won't be running all of those on the same days. 

https://adirondackrr.com/departure-schedules/

The $75 ticket for Utica-Tupper Lake is a pretty good price, especially since the inaugural runs was $180 I think. It's an 11-hour ride though, which is a long trip in a closed-window car behind diesels. I'm strongly considering boarding one of those at Thendara and riding it to Tupper Lake and back without a layover, since it's only $45, and that's the most scenic and remote stretch of the line that is still extant. Apparently the Saranac Lake-Lake Placid stretch north of Tupper Lake was even better but that's gone now, turned into a rail trail

Speaking of that stupid rail trail, which was all a crooked put-up deal by politicians and wealthy NIMBYs, I saw a news article that says that it won't be open this year due to it still being under construction. How is it taking them 3 years now to open up a trail that was being built on an existing railroad bed? The rails and ties were torn up immediately (had to rush that through before anyone could find a way to stop it), so that's not the hold-up. The Adirondack extensively overhauled the line from Thendara-Tupper Lake, which hadn't seen any work since the '50s at the latest) and also fixed a bunch of other areas to increase track speed in a third of the time. 

The other mind-blowing part of it is that, when the Adirondack proposed them just laying a trail alongside the tracks on the north end, the answer was "Nope, not enough room for both a trail and train tracks and we can't widen the corridor because it's a preserved area." Then the latest news article I saw on the trail said it was "100-feet wide with 2.5 feet shoulders on either edge." Wait a minute, they would have had to have cut back trees to make it that wide, and at 100 feet wide, there somehow isn't enough room for a trail and the 10-12 feet that the railroad would need? The whole things smacks of bullE36 M3. And on top of that, the trail proponents and villages along the way are already saying "Oh, this trail isn't going to be that useful, because it's just a 34 mile straight corridor with no connections along the way." They thought they were going to be allowed to build connecting trails with it, so you could get on and off along the way and go into various nearby towns, and never checked with the state, and as soon as they tried building them, they were told they weren't allowed because it goes through state park land. Just brilliant, guys.