Welcome to Part 25 on the Lackawanna Cut-Off: the Other Lackawanna Cut-Off. Hi, I'm Chuck Walsh and I'm president of the
North Jersey Rail Commuter Association and we're here in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
in the midst of lots of activity, which may be competing with us as we go along
here. What we're going to do today is do a trek between here, Scranton, and Binghamton, New York. Now, in between is what I'll call the
Pennsylvania Cut-Off, the Clarks Summit- Hallstead Cut-Off. [Train horn...and bell.] Well, nothing like a train, or in this
case a bunch of locomotives, to steal the show. But what we're going to be doing
today is go from Scranton to Binghamton New York. In between...Clarks
Summit, which if you were to look up through the hills here is up in that
notch over there, and the railroad goes from here to there, a 1.4% grade going up
the hill to Clarks Summit. At the top of the grade is the beginning of the new
line. We're actually gonna get to see the old line as well. There were two lines...[train horn in distance]... There were two lines: an old line, which
ran between Clarks Summit and Hallstead, and a new line which ran--or does run,
because it's currently active Norfolk Southern Railroad--between Clarks Summit
and Hallstead. Now, why are we going all the way to Binghamton? Well, we'll explain as we go along, but Scranton and Binghamton are really the
two major cities in this area, and I don't want to say there's nothing in
between, but many trains--I'll use it as an example,
the Phoebe Snow--would go from here at Scranton, just up the ways here, go
through here, past Bridge 60. I'm gonna move over to Bridge 60 here. Bridge 60 is over here. Bridge 60 Tower. And would go up and head on off and
would not stop until it reached Binghamton. As we go through our episode today, we're
going to talk about the other cut-off and to help us do that
we've asked, and he's agreed--agreed a year ago, as a matter of fact--Josh Stull,
an historian who grew up in Nicholson, Pennsylvania. Josh will be helping us out.
He'll be joining us. He'll be joining us at Nicholson, appropriately. But what
we're going to do is to go up next to Clarks Summit; we'll talk about the
Cut-Off; we'll show you where that Cut-Off began, and then we're going to take a
ride along the old line, or the Old Road in Pennsylvania, which is now a highway.
It has been a highway for a long time. We'll explain why that is the case, and
then we'll meet Josh and we'll go from there. So, here we go... Here we are in Chinchilla, Pennsylvania,
the Village of Chinchilla. The rail line is behind us here. We are in Liggett's
Gap, which in the grand scheme of things played a crucial role in the building of
the Lackawanna Railroad west of Scranton. Scranton is in that direction; Clarks
Summit, which is our next stop, is in that direction. Chinchilla itself was not very important, but, the location of the rail line, as I said, was crucial because if this gap
created by Liggett's Creek did not exist, it's not clear how they would have actually
built the railroad from here and then all the way to Clarks Summit and beyond.
I don't know exactly where the station was in Chinchilla. There was a station. It
was discontinued in 1902, so the railroad didn't think very much of the
station. But, once again, the actual rail line location was extremely
important to the building of the rail line from Scranton and to the west.
Oh, you're probably wondering how the heck did it get the name
Chinchilla? Apparently, the postmaster, who it seemed as if was a female, had a
coat made of chinchilla. And somehow that name stuck. And that's how the Village of
Chinchilla got its name. So, our next stop is Clarks Summit, and
we're working our way to the beginning of the Pennsylvania Cut-Off Here we are at the station in Clarks
Summit, about two miles west of where we were just before: Chinchilla. Chinchilla
is in the midst of the Liggett's Gap. We're now at the top of the hill and
the beginning of the Cut-Off is maybe about a quarter-mile or so down this way.
The tracks are in this direction. We'll walk over there in just a second. When we
get over yonder, which is our next stop, we'll talk about the similarities and
differences between the Pennsylvania Cut-Off and the New Jersey Cut-Off. One
difference is that the Pennsylvania Cut-Off didn't have the same degree of,
shall we say, finality at the ends of the Cut-Off itself. In other words, in New Jersey you have on the east end, Port Morris Junction; on the west end, Slateford Junction. Here, you don't quite have that. When I was here back in the
80s, there were still tracks here in front of the station. I don't
recall--it's now 30 some odd years ago-- I don't think they went made very much
further, and I don't even remember if there was any kind of active customers
here. But I do remember the tracks being here. So, there was a junction per se, but
it was really just a spur, for when the the Cut-Off was put in and opened in 1915
they left one track in here, but basically everything west of here, with a
couple of exceptions which we'll get into, was basically abandoned and the
tracks were removed. Now, in terms of the station, this setup is somewhat similar
to the Lake Hopatcong station. This station, this building here, opened in
1913. So that's actually a couple years before the Cut-Off opened. They put it
up here on the hill. Now, the old line was still here at that point. But
when you go over here...if someone, let's say, brought their baggage into
the station, got the ticket, and was gonna wait for the train,
they'd have to go down to meet the train, quite a ways down. It's about, I'm gonna guess, 30 feet or so to go down. But there were stairs to go
down. I'm trying to remember if there was a ramp or somehow where the
baggage could be hauled down, because going down a number of steps would have
been inconvenient to say the least. But, there was a shelter down there, so in
in bad weather a person would have been able to go down there and be ready
for the train to arrive down below. But when they built the Cut-Off, they
excavated it out, so this is a deep cut here to lessen the grade, to the extent that
they could from the start of the Cut-Off, which is, once again, down I'm saying a quarter mile, maybe just a little bit more. But that's about it. So,
this is the station at Clarks Summit. Our next stop we're just going to, basically, drive around and end up just on the
other side here of the right-of-way at what is called Old Lackawanna Trail, which is basically the continuation of the old line, the
right-of-way of the old line. Now, of course, the tracks are long gone, but the
right-of-way of the old line, which we'll follow all the way to Nicholson. Okay, so straight ahead you can see the
continuation of the right-of-way, is going west from the station here at Clarks
Summit. We can't go that way, so we're going to have to just take a real quick
jog over onto this street here. Past the fire station in Clarks Summit. Looks like a building that lasted from the
railroad era. Old Lackawanna Trail. Here we are in Clarks Summit,
Pennsylvania. We're at the top of the grade, and what we're looking at now--and
we'll show you a similar shot from 1915- 1916 of this--but basically where you see
that overhead bridge in the distance, just beyond that would be the beginning
of the new line: the Pennsylvania Cut-Off, the Clarks Summit-Hallstead Cut-Off.
Beyond there is the grade down to Scranton, where we just came from. To
our right, and where we're going to walk over to, is the grade of the old line
here in Pennsylvania that the Cut-Off here replaced. They're literally side-by-side. So, let's walk over. And you can see up on the sign there, they
didn't have enough room: it's Old Lacka Trail, but it's Old Lackawanna Trail. And
the reason why it's the Old Lackawanna Trail is that... this is the right-of-way of the old line.
It would go down, basically, where we showed you just a few seconds
ago, and then continues on. And we're going to take you on a ride, but just to
show you now, continues on... So, Clarks Summit, the beginning of the, I'll
call it, the Pennsylvania Cut-Off. There are different names that are sometimes
used: the Nicholson Cut-Off; Summit Cut-Off; the Clarks Summit-Hallstead Cut-Off; the
Pennsylvania Cut-Off, and so forth. So when I'm referring to the
"Cut-Off" this time, unless I specifically say the New Jersey Cut-Off, I'm really
referring to that line which is right over there. And the old line, which is
what I'm physically standing on. Now, in terms of comparing the New
Jersey Cut-Off with the Pennsylvania Cut-Off, there are similarities and there
are differences. Talking about similarities, well, they're
both cut-offs, obviously. But they were built for different reasons. For the New
Jersey Cut-Off they certainly wanted to be more efficient, but they also wanted to
save mileage, and they saved 11 miles for the New Jersey Cut-Off when that was
built. This Cut-Off, however, only saved about three and a half miles, roughly.
It wasn't really the major reason for building it. It was really to lessen the grades and to decrease the number of curves. This
line here, and this continues on, was almost 50 percent curvature. In other
words, 50 percent of the line, the mileage, was curves, which was
detrimental to running an efficient operation, particularly when you think
about that when the Cut-Off here was built--which it was built between May 1st of 1912 and opened on
November 6, 1915--in those days the big commodity that the Lackawanna
Railroad was carrying was coal coming out of the Scranton Valley up the grade.
But it wasn't the grade. It's still there; that'll always be there; there's really
nothing you can do about it from a geographical perspective. But what they
could do was to make the line, and the operation, more efficient up here. Because
this particular old line was more or less a roller-coaster ride, with curves,
and all that kind of stuff. So what they did was when they built the line it was
with that intent rather than so much in the saving of distance.
But that presented its own issues. Whereas with the New Jersey Cut-Off, the Old Road in New Jersey was retained;
yes, it was downgraded, but it wasn't, as would happen with this, abandoned. It
stayed in operation until about 1970, although it petered out as time went
on. But it was never really abandoned, at least certainly not as quickly as this
was. This line is, once the Pennsylvania Cut-Off is opened, this
line is quickly downgraded and, for the most part, abandoned, much of it for
tax reasons. And actually much of the line becomes, basically, a road, a
highway, and that was primarily for tax purposes. Of course, that would come back
to haunt, because then what that basically did was to create a parallel
highway to the railroad, which did not previously exist. But getting back to the New Jersey Cut-Off, the Old Road in New Jersey, that was geographically removed from the Cut-Off; whereas these are literally going to be
side by side for much of the distance between here and Hallstead. In some
cases, they actually will cross each other. And as we get towards Hallstead
there will be sections where they're almost literally the same. But,
once again, the overarching goal was not necessarily to save mileage but to
create a more efficient operation, which they did. Now, one of the downsides
to having these side-by-side lines--in other words, this Cut-Off was primarily built up into the hill, and would, in some cases, be bored into the side of a mountain. Whereas this line here
was down here. So there's usually this kind of thing that was happening for
much of the route. The difference, the only difference being, is when we're between here and Nicholson the lines diverge. But once you get past Nicholson,
the lines really are almost like this much of the time. And now the problem that created was
that you had customers on this line who could not necessarily use this line. And
if you look at the old correspondence from 1916 and such, where they're trying
to tear out this line here to save taxes and basically recoup
salvage costs that would be good towards the bottom line, they're also having to
deal with customers on this line that don't want to be abandoned, so
to speak. And, actually, there is one concession that there was a line, a
sort of a temporary line, that was built between Nicholson and Foster. But for
the most part this line would get basically abandoned as time goes on. So
that means that these customers here either have to go to here somehow or
just basically stop using the railroad entirely. That issue did not emerge on the New
Jersey Cut-Off, because for the New Jersey Cut-Off and the Old Road in New Jersey were miles
apart, and they were treated almost as separate railroads, but with an operation
that the Old Road in New Jersey supported the Cut-Off in many ways. That
was not the case here; this is totally different in that respect.
Other similarities? Well, the building of this particular Cut-Off was divided
into ten sections. There's an "11th" section that's west of New Milford, which
is kind of interesting, but essentially ten sections. Whereas the New Jersey
Cut-Off was divided into seven sections, not necessarily of equal length. They
tried to balance the amount of work, and it didn't exactly work for various
reasons, which we've gone over in previous episodes. But here they divided
into ten--well, eleven sections for all intents and purposes. Some of the same
folks, names you would be familiar with as has been mentioned in, for example,
our episode on the construction of the Cut-Off, appear again.
David W. Flickwir did work both on the New Jersey Cut-Off and the Pennsylvania
Cut-Off. Lincoln Bush, he actually joins Flickwir.
Flickwir & Bush are involved with the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct.
I'm sure Josh will tell us a little bit more about that. Walter H. Gahagan,
and so forth. Not all the same people, but there were a few that manage
to get themselves into doing both cut- offs. They had to build new stations. Not all
the stations on this Cut-Off were built of reinforced concrete as they were on
the New Jersey Cut-Off. There were brick stations, so it was
not an exclusive edict that somehow they'd have to use reinforced concrete.
However, the two viaducts--there are two two big viaduct on this line,
both of which are bigger than Hainesburg Viaduct, which is the bigger of the two viaducts
on the New Jersey Cut-Off. But you'll notice a very strong
similarity in terms of their style, shall we say, the Beaux Arts type of style that
was used. And so forth. I mean there are a number of ways to compare the two
cut-offs. But really they're quite a bit different in some ways, this one being
in Pennsylvania, of course, but you have really two large cities on the outer reaches,
not part of the Cut-Off, but where the Cut- Off is between. Certainly, it's not quite
the same with the New Jersey Cut-Off because you have the Delaware Water Gap
and you have Port Morris or Lake Hopatcong. So it's really
quite a bit different in that respect. In terms of passenger service, the difference here is, for example, with the New Jersey Cut-Off, Blairstown
remained as a stop all the way to the end of passenger service in the
beginning of 1970. By the 1950s, there's very little in the way of passenger
service on this Cut-Off. Freight service, yes, of course,
I mean it's still the main line. But passenger service, where the trains would be
stopping, trains like the Phoebe Snow still ran but they didn't stop in
between, in other words, like in places like Nicholson or Foster or New Milford.
Maybe New Milford. New Milford was probably the closest in terms of a station that actually did
see some passenger service into the 1950s. But otherwise the other stations
have been long downgraded and not being used. So, anyway, that's an
overview of the the Cut-Off here. So what we're going to do is we're going to
drive along the old line, which is the Old Lackawanna Trail, and give you an
idea what that's like. And our next stop is the big ticket item I guess you would
have to say on this particular video, although stick with us for the
rest of it, but obviously the big crowd-pleaser is the Tunkhannock
Viaduct, and that is our next stop. Okay, we're on the Old Lackawanna Trail, which is the old line in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Cut-Off is to our right. This was a double-track railroad for the
most part. If you look at the railroad's
correspondents they seem like they desperately wanted to sell off the
right-of-way, this old right-of-way which was being abandoned and, as a result, they wanted to probably find the quickest
way to do that. And the quickest way to do that was to essentially donate it to the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and that took care of the tax problem. But,
ultimately, to some extent would have created another problem, which I
mentioned previously, which was that this is now a parallel roadway to compete with
your railroad, at least in terms of passenger, and then later years certainly in terms of freight as well. In this section we diverge from the new line. The new
line will be to our west and we will be for the most part, well, for the whole
time before Nicholson, to the east of the new line. Now, the Lackawanna
ran from Hoboken to Buffalo. So, if you're going from Hoboken to Buffalo that was
considered westbound. The section we are covering now, the direction we're going in
is westbound. Although, if you were to look at a compass for the most part
we're going to be going north. So it's a little bit deceiving. So when I say east
and west, if you're going north, well, to your left would be east, to your
right would be west. But it's only because we're going to Binghamton, and
once--and we're not going to go beyond Binghamton--but once you get to
Binghamton the railroad goes almost due west for a while to Elmira and so forth, along the Southern Tier. But so when I refer to westbound, it's really what
they call timetable west. Now, the first
station, and here we see Dalton. The first station
on this line west of Clarks Summit was Dalton. The station was here, but they when
they expanded this road, it was torn down. So it no longer exists. It's
difficult to tell driving along whether this was really a
railroad or not at one time. There may be vestiges of old businesses and things
that might suggest, if you knew enough about the area, that, well, okay, this
must have been a railroad at one time. But don't forget that this line
where we are right now hasn't operated as a railroad in 104
years, basically in over a century. So essentially it
wouldn't be surprising that there's not going to be a lot that we're going to
see that's going to strike us as being this was a railroad. You can tell
there are curves. Now, the original railroad probably is
more in the center, and they did expand this highway. But essentially the
alignment is going to be pretty much the same. One of the places where there
would be a departure from this alignment would be for what was called Nicholson
Tunnel. We're not going through any tunnel on this particular roadway, but
this--and here comes LaPlume, which was the next stop if the train stopped
west of Clarks Summit-- but the tunnel...there are tunnels on both
lines. Factoryville Tunnel, which is on the new line, that's a brick-lined
tunnel, which is unique on the Lackawanna. And then there's Nicholson Tunnel--or
tunnels, because there are two separate tunnels on this line-- we won't see those here, because
they're off to the side, so to speak. And when they built this road they were wise enough to bypass those tunnels. As I said, the line is roughly 50% curves and you can see we're going through yet another curve. We can show you photos of those tunnels.
There was a trolley line which actually wanted to use them, and that didn't work
out. But back in the days when trolleys were still pretty much the rage. I want
to say the Northern Electric Trolley or Traction Company. So, this is primarily a...I don't know if I
would call it rural, but certainly not a heavily populated area. And it was not in
the days of when they built the Pennsylvania Cut-Off. The Lackawanna
really didn't have a way to create a passenger base that would have justified
having stops where trains would stop with intermediate stops on the
Pennsylvania Cut-Off. There were trains that did stop, once again through the 50s,
but the big-name trains like, once again, the Phoebe Snow, did not. Because there just wasn't enough ridership
to justify that. The Cut-Off was built with the intent that the trains would be able to do at least 70 miles an hour
most of the time. They tried to keep it like the New Jersey Cut-Off, tried to keep
the curves to two degrees or below, which they were not able to do all
the time. They have a couple of three degree curves. The difference between the New Jersey Cut-Off and the Pennsylvania Cut-Off... Here's a sign for Tunkhannock. That's a different Tunkhannock. The Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct is named after Tunkhannock Creek. But when they built the Pennsylvania
Cut-Off they stayed on the side of hills for the most part; whereas, the New
Jersey Cut-Off basically ran at right angles through hills and, therefore, you'd
have a cut through the hill, and then a fill, and then a cut through the next
hill, and then a fill, and so forth. Here, on this Cut-Off it's not quite the same. The experience I can remember when riding on a
train on this Cut-Off is that if you're on the wrong wrong side of the train you're looking up at
the side of a cut, whereas the other side of the train is looking out and has a
nice view of the countryside. On the New Jersey Cut-Off it's rare that there's one side that has a good view and the other one doesn't;
it's either or: either both sides have a good view, or both sides don't, if
you're in a cut. Lackawanna Trail High School next left. I want to say that the line went off
to the left here because this is seems too steep of a grade for a railroad,
and I'm guessing that this is where the road and the old railroad bed have separated, and
that the tunnel would be somewhere off to our left.
This is way too steep for a railroad at least one would expect for a mainline
railroad. We're just entering Nicholson now. But we will rejoin the old right-of-way on the other side of this hill. Yeah, I'm guessing this is, like, three,
four percent. This would be for a mainline railroad, this would be a
monstrous grade. Remember in a previous episode I talked about the rule-of-thumb
that for every 0.1% increase in grade it means a 40% increase in
horsepower that's required to have the same equivalent effect as would be on a
flat and straight piece of track. So if you talk about 1% you're talking
about basically a 400% increase in effort. So decreasing the grade has an
enormous effect on the amount of power, the number of locomotives, or horsepower,
however you want to look at it, that is needed to pull particularly freight
trains, although to some extent that would affect passenger trains as well. Like the grade going up to Clarks Summit
is 1.4%, so you're talking about a 560% increase in power needed. That's
why they had to add additional locomotives to pull or push trains
up the hill. And the building of this Cut-Off
eliminated a good portion of that. It didn't eliminate the grade going up from
Scranton; there was nothing that really could be done about that. There were some
crazy ideas about building a viaduct across the Scranton Valley and that
didn't go anywhere. It would be almost impossible to find places that were
stable because of all the coal mines in and around Scranton. Even if you were
to contemplate such a thing there'd be no way you could be
guaranteed that you wouldn't be building over a mineshaft and have your whole
viaduct fall into the mine. So, as a result, that idea basically
that went nowhere. Now, there actually were several
different routes that were...ah! Here we go! Surprise! The Tunkhannock Viaduct.
And we'll show you a view of this as a railroad going past the Tunkhannock Viaduct. And we'll just go literally under it. Obviously, we are in Nicholson,
and we have a sign which says "Nicholson". And it has a pretty picture of a familiar-looking bridge. And the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct, the Nicholson
Viaduct, Nicholson Bridge, whatever you want to call it..one in the same. To say that it is big is an
understatement. Trains on top of it look like toy trains because it's so big. So, this is Nicholson. What we're
going to do is we're going to join our friend, Josh Stull, and he's going to join
us for the rest of the trip going out to Binghamton. And we will rely on his
expertise and knowledge as a historian. And so off we go to meet with him as we
will begin our trek westbound or northbound, however you want to look at
it, to Binghamton. CHUCK: Hi, we're here at Nicholson, Pennsylvania. This guy's hometown. This is Josh Stull. Did I pronounce that correctly? JOSH STULL: Yes, Stull. CHUCK: Maybe you want to tell us a little bit
about yourself, and I'm gonna get out of the picture here and let you just
handle it from here in terms about talking about this structure behind us
and that structure a little bit maybe as well. JOSH: Okay, great. Thank you, Chuck. Hi, yeah, my name is Josh Stull. I grew up in Nicholson, Pennsylvania,
population 700. I'm obsessed with the DL&W. And so I'll just jump right in. The
station behind me was built by a predecessor railroad called the
Liggett's Gap Railroad in 1849. It was originally actually built to house the
workers who built the line between Scranton and Great Bend, and then
eventually it became a passenger and freight station. So the freight part of the station is basically a little bit to the right of
the big door here. The middle two windows is the station agent room. And then the
room on the end is the passenger side. So when the D&W built their new Cut-Off the
new line which, of course, is now where you see the bridge over there, they still
used this station as the freight station, because they built the new passenger
station up on the side of the mountain next to the bridge; that building is no
longer around, it burned in the 90s, I believe, and they just tore it down. But then
the D&W had a spur line that went to the town next up--five miles north, six
miles north of us called Hop Bottom--so that spur line serviced Hop Bottom and
then Nicholson here. And then I always like to say about the station: this
station was a passenger and freight station, which is true, it was, longer
than it was just a freight station. In terms of the the bridge itself,
I've already told this to Chuck: my bedroom faced the bridge. So every
morning I would see the Sun coming through the arches;
hence the obsession! But the bridge itself, three years to build; it was
about a million dollars out of the 12 million that cost to build the Cut-Off,
and at one point you would be seeing trains go, what, 10-20 times a day between
passenger and freight trains, and now it's just it's used for freight by Norfolk
Southern who bought it from Canadian Pacific about three years ago. In terms of
Nicholson itself, this station was the center of the community.
It was the post office at one point. I mean this is how people went to and from.
There's a hotel that was built right here; it's called the Nicholson House. You
won't be able to see it, maybe. But hotels were built around the station
because with all the traffic coming, and definitely when they were building the
bridge, people needed a place to stay. In terms of what's going on with the
station now, the Nicholson Heritage Association, of which I'm a member,
received a PENNDOT grant in 2014, and so it's going to be used to renovate the
station, keeping it as close to original as possible, and then have it as a museum
that people can come and visit telling the history of not just Nicholson the
railroading, but tying it into the DL&W. Also Route 92, which is right
over going this way to Tunkhannock. It's called the Viaduct Valley Way
Scenic Byway. It goes to the Starrucca Viaduct in Lanesboro. Also a pretty cool
structure that was a cut stone bridge built in 1848. CHUCK: Okay, Josh and I are here again. We've
moved a little westbound to what the railroad called Foster. I
don't know where Foster came from, do you know where Foster...? JOSH: No. CHUCK: The town
of Hop Bottom is nearby and, in fact, up until 1870--now I should point out that we are on the new line, the Cut-Off here. This is the Foster
station on the new line. The town of Hop Bottom, where the old line was, is down
below us, and Josh will explain more about the history or whatever you want
to talk about about Hop Bottom, and also the fact that there was rail service
that continued beyond when this was opened in 1915. JOSH: Great, thanks,
Chuck. So, right, this is the new main line. And as Chuck said somewhere here
was the old Foster station that was actually built when the new line was
opened in 1915. Like Nicholson down in the bottom of the hill,
Hop Bottom is basically that way. They had a spur line that came from
basically in the middle of Hop Bottom and Nicolson, they had a spur line that came
down the hill, and actually it's right over the hill here, that went to the old
freight station in Hop Bottom and then also to the freight station /
former passenger and freight station in Nicholson. And so the station that was
here before on this location was just passenger, similar to Nicholson, the
station that was up next to the bridge was passenger only. And so I don't know exactly here when they had freight service continue to but
it's at least into the 70s. And for Nicholson the big thing was automobiles.
There was an automobile dealership, so they had cars delivered by train, by rail,
and feed. And even for Hop Bottom there was a feed store here because in this part of Pennsylvania dairy farming was very big and the farmers
needed the feed. So, thanks! CHUCK: Here we are at the Martin's Creek Viaduct
in Kingsley, Pennsylvania. This is the smaller sister of the two viaducts on the Nicholson Cut-Off. I'm gonna hand it off to Josh who's going to talk
a little bit about the viaduct and there's some interesting aspects about
this which are really unique in which you don't see in any of the other three
viaducts that the Lackawanna built on its two cut-offs. JOSH: Thanks, Chuck, yeah one
is that the Martin's Creek Viaduct was finished a year before the Cut-Off opened, and when
they finished in 1914 they actually had a party up on the deck of the
viaduct. And then if you look at the top, what I appreciate for the Martin's Creek
Viaduct versus the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct is for the columns, it's
modern deco. See how it has the fancy raised motif, and then it actually comes
out. Whereas for the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct, that's basically all just flat. And so
it's a nice little touch to the little sister of the Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct. CHUCK: Keep going. You still recording? JOSH: I missed something. CHUCK: I just want to point, and we have a
nice photo from the Steamtown archives, which we'll show. This is the Old Road,
the old line, which goes through the arches, or this particular arch here. We
have a really nice shot of a train coming through here from the opposite
side the shot was taken, and gives you an idea that this is one of the places we
talked about where the two lines were close together. In this case, they
literally cross, this one crossed under that one up on top. And it's kind of interesting because this structure was already up when
trains were still running, as was the case in Nicholson as well. But it gave
the people on the trains an interesting perspective of seeing, they're riding the
old line, but they're seeing what's going to be coming in the future, the future
being 1915, as opposed to now, today, 2019. LARISSA: Good? CHUCK: Done. CHUCK: Here we are at Alford, Pennsylvania. The
station is still here on the new line. The tower, which we'll look at
shortly, is behind our videographer. I'll leave it to you, what do you want to say
about the station? It's not in good shape. It's been deteriorating, but it is
still here, and that's more that we can say for some stations.
And so I'll turn it over to Josh. JOSH: Sure. One tidbit of information is that on the
old line they had a new station built in 1911-1912, and then, of course, when the
line was opened in 1915 they tore that old station down and then you have the
new station. So do you want to walk in, or do you want to just...? CHUCK: You can lead
the way and we'll follow. JOSH: So I thought I would talk about the station
inside. The freight room--because for Alford the station was both freight and
passenger. So right now we're in the freight side of the station, and we won't
walk all the way through because I don't think we would
need to. But the next room is the station agent's office. Of course, you can see how
bad it is once the roof goes, everything. Water damage does wonders. And then the
next room after that was the passenger side of the station. There's two
rooms in the back end which were the rest rooms. And I don't know if our
videographer can see this but there's actually a stairway that goes down to
the basement, which is now all full with water, so we won't be going in there. It actually has a second floor as well.
You can see there was an attic. It was a pretty nice station when it was
built. CHUCK: Now the station you
mentioned at the beginning, I'll say the original Alford station that was
supposed to be on the Cut-Off, ended up being a mistake because the alignment of the
Cut-Off was changed after it was built. So, that's the reason why this is the second
station that was built, but not because it was on the old line but because the alignment of the Cut-Off itself had been changed in the meantime,
in between the time of the planning for the station and the time they actually built it. OK, we've moved just slightly east of the
station at Alford. This is the old interlocking tower. I'm gonna let Josh
speak to it. It's not in any better shape than the station is, but it is here,
so that's the good news. Josh, what do you have to say about this?
JOSH: Sure. So, like the station it was built in 1915 and it was the interlocking tower
for the Montrose Branch, which Montrose is the county seat for Susquehanna
County, and like other parts of this part of Pennsylvania dairy farming was a big
deal. And Chuck reminded me that the Montrose Branch was discontinued in 1940-1941. CHUCK: ...And also the station in Alford was originally named Montrose at
one time. At some point what I'll call my hometown station was originally called Montrose as well. I guess there would have been
confusion, but there was actually a Montrose which was called Montrose. The
station in South Orange, New Jersey became Mountain Station. It seems like for some of these stations, the railroad changed the name so there wasn't confusion to passengers, but it
might have been confusing to people who lived in the area, like Hop Bottom and
Foster, that type of thing. People say: "I want to go to Hop Bottom." Well, there is
no Hop Bottom; there's only Foster. That kind of thing. But this
station, I think you remember, we've both been on Steamtown excursions which came here. JOSH: Yeah. CHUCK: Unfortunately, Steamtown doesn't do those excursions
anymore. But what else can we say? Other than that,
this is an active line, Norfolk Southern. We're still waiting for a train to come by; we don't know the schedule, but we'll see. JOSH: Fingers crossed. CHUCK: We'll have our fingers crossed, yeah, we'll see if we can capture a train. CHUCK: Well, here we are at Hallstead, Pennsylvania, being eaten alive by gnats, and in Part 21 it was all sorts of different
bugs, and now we've at least, I've graduated to gnats, but Josh has joined me. Hallstead...somewhere in here is the end of the Cut-Off, but Josh
wants to talk about the station here, and then we'll get into a little bit of
a mystery we think that we have on our hands and we're trying to solve. JOSH: Thank you. Yeah, I thought I would just talk about
this station, as you can see, it looks a lot like the Alford station that we just
came from, and the big difference, though, is this was built in 1903-1904, and it
actually looks in fairly good shape. But that's because up until, it looks like,
fairly recently it was used as a senior living home. And it still has a sign, of
course, Hallstead. I'll turn over back to Chuck to talk about the Cut-Off. CHUCK: Yeah, the mystery that we have is that
the Pennsylvania Cut-Off was built in ten sections, at least if you look at
a map, which we'll show you. But the tenth section ended at New Milford, which
is east of here. However, the Cut-Off continues, and presumably continued a
little bit farther west--northbound or westbound--of
here. But there wasn't any contractor associated with that section. Now, what's
unique about this section is that there was a lot of overlap between
the old and the new, and we're wondering if perhaps--and we'll be doing more
research on this--and we're wondering if perhaps there wasn't as much
construction involved with this other than maybe moving tracks from this spot to
another. Because if the Cut-Off was still here, in other words the Cut-Off
still had a little bit to go, this station wouldn't be here. It wouldn't make any sense.
That it would be from 1904 because obviously the the Cut-Off didn't start
construction until 1912; they wouldn't have known, it just doesn't make any
sense...unless...the old and the new were very, very close to one another, in which
case, or maybe even occupying the identical spot, which in some cases it
did. So, this is a not a huge mystery, but it is something that needs further
looking into because it is kind of a little bit of a poser in terms of why is
that? It doesn't make a lot of sense. But we'll figure it out...or maybe we
won't. But either way we're gonna at least try to figure it out. So,
we do have one more stop to make and that is the city of Binghamton, and
there we'll talk about a few things not the least of which perhaps is this shirt
I've been wearing. But there are a few other things to talk about as well at
Binghamton, being it was one of the major cities on the Lackawanna. CHUCK: Here we are about a mile or so west of
New Milford. New Milford is in that direction; Hallstead is in this direction. First of all, let me put aside the
overarching issue that I brought up at Hallstead, and that is about Section 11.
There is no Section 11. There's only Section 10. I misread the
map and this particular section, which I'm going to describe because it is
unique, the Cut-Off portion was done by Walter H. Gahagan. Now, what you just
saw is not the Cut-Off. When we get to the building of the Cut-Off, which
I'm going to go through a little bit of a chronology first, but when we get to
the building of the Cut-Off they're actually two separate lines here: an
old line--and a new line, which is behind us, behind me. Well, let's start at the
beginning. Just to orient you, the line you see over here... opened on October 15th, 1851. This is the
original line this goes back--if you want to go back even further--to the
Liggett's Gap Railroad. But this was built by the Delaware & Lackawanna; it's not even
the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western yet. So, that line is there in 1851. As we get to 1899,
William Truesdale takes over as president of the Lackawanna, at that
point the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western. They want to improve the
railroad; they want to make it more efficient. In New Jersey, the New Jersey
Cut-Off is built and that's finished at the end of 1911. Work here begins in May
of 1912. So just a few months after the the finish of the New Jersey Cut-Off. Now,
the section between New Milford and Hallstead, which is about six miles, is
unique for a few reasons. But, specifically it's unique because when
they build the Cut-Off here it actually is in addition to this line here; they
don't take away this line as if they do basically almost everywhere else on the
Cut-Off east of New Milford. Now, New Milford sits at the summit. So, on both
ends--this side and the other side--there are grades going down. On this line it
was 0.9%. They wanted to improve that for a couple reasons. One was just to improve
the grade, but also for freight trains coming in and out of Hallstead yard. Hallstead Yard was
located just across from the station that we were just at.
So what they do is Mr. Gahagan and company are contracted to build a new
line for the ascending grade--in other words, the upgrade--from Hallstead to New
Milford. The downgrade, or descending grade from New Milford to Hallstead, remains the
same. It's still the same old line. So, you will have two tracks here, and then two
tracks up here. And I'm literally going to point that out. Now maybe I'm getting
ahead of myself, but the thing is that this line up here--the Cut-Off up on that
embankment, which will basically run parallel to the road, which will take you on
a little bit of a ride in a few minutes. It's gone. In some cases, completely gone,
but it's abandoned and it's no longer used. So, essentially what was done is that as you
go towards New Milford, the new line, the Cut-Off, came like this and joined up, or
shall we say diverged... from the old line, and then as you go
towards Hallstead eventually what happens is this new line eventually diverges in--or converges in--to this line. And so what you end up with, at least at
the beginning when the Cut-Off opened in November 1915, you had two tracks here and
two tracks there. And at the summit, you had four tracks together. But then you have the two on each of the rights-of-way diverging. And then you get four tracks going
into Hallstead. So it stays like that for a bit, the better part of 30, about 30 years or so. But before moving
on, I do want to add that this section here--the Gahagan section--was plagued
with all sorts of issues in terms of what was a swamp that this basically went
through. This line they built away from the swamp. Well, this one they built into
the swamp. They had problems with sinkholes and
they had problems with quicksand. Quicksand was a problem at the Tunkhannock Viaduct,
which actually delayed that project for the better part of four months. But here
they didn't have the advantage of building a viaduct on top of this; they
had to build with dirt fill, which in 1927 leads to a big problem in that
there was a fatal wreck that occurred, which we will show you where we think it
might have happened. But whatever the case, Gahagan finally gets to the bottom
of this bottomless swamp and is able to fill it in and build embankments where
they needed to have embankments to basically lessen the grade; they lessened the grade to 0.6%. So it's 0.9% here, 0.6% there--eh, it's an improvement.
So now fast forwarding, after the Second World War, late 1940s, they take
out the extra track, so that you only have one track here and one track up
there. They didn't need it for the freight traffic that was there at the
time when they built the Cut-Off with four tracks. And that will remain pretty
much the story through the Erie Lackawanna years. We can show you a photo of
Erie Lackawanna close to New Milford where they're still two
tracks. Conrail takes over and we start to see a story that plays out very similar to what happens in
New Jersey. Don't forget this is one continuous line between Hoboken and
Binghamton. The New Jersey Cut-Off was part of that; this Cut-Off--the Pennsylvania Cut-Off--was part of that as well. At the end of 1978, the New Jersey Cut-Off is put out of service
and that's the opening salvo towards abandonment. The same thing happens over
here. Now the difference over here is that there will be an effort to
save it, and a railroad will come in. Now, interestingly enough, it was back in the late 50s where the New Jersey Cut-Off is single-tracked. They actually kicked that around here. Perry Shoemaker, the president
of the Lackawanna at that time, the last president of the Lackawanna, kicked around that
here with with this Cut-Off where you have-- well, the whole Cut-Off
would have been two tracks--but here you would have had two tracks that are separated
by a space, a distance. When you get to around 1980, the
Delaware and Hudson becomes interested in this line, and it so happens that
Perry Shoemaker's son, Kent Shoemaker, plays an integral role--he's
the president of the Delaware and Hudson, the D&H, and they acquire this line
for operations. So this is saved at the same time while things are playing out
not so well in New Jersey. Now, the Delaware & Hudson will be here; I think the
New York, Susquehanna & Western will take over for a little
bit; the Canadian Pacific; and, ultimately, the Norfolk Southern, right around 2005, will
will take over the line. But the story with this Cut-Off will be a series of
woes that occur starting in the 1980s, late 1980s, after the line is abandoned.
They take up the tracks. They decide they don't need this--this is the Delaware &
Hudson--they decide they don't need that extra track and they basically will
have that track which they will be using, the old line. Well, that opens the door,
and this is coincidentally at the same time that Mr. Turco was talking about
taking away the fill off the Cut-Off in New Jersey, the D&H sells off this
right-of-way. I'm not sure if they actually sell it off, but they basically
give a local sand and gravel company out of New Milford the rights to take it
up and they actually lots of it, not all of it, apparently, but in some places
the fill is literally taken up and the right-of-way disappears. We'll travel along that. It's gonna be very difficult in places to really tell where there was
a railroad. But the reason why that's done is that the Public Utilities
Commission in Pennsylvania comes in and condemns several of these
underpasses with problems similar to what you see in New Jersey: narrow
underpasses, you have a school that's over here. But that occurs after the
railroad is abandoned. So basically we'll show you where we
think there are remnants of one of those overpasses. But basically, the
railroad--this railroad, the Cut-Off--ceases to exist as of about 1990-ish or so. So when
you think of the Cut-Off, is it now only the Clarks Summit-New Milford Cut-Off now? People still refer to it as going to Hallstead, but technically the
Cut-Off portion of the right-of-way from New Milford to Hallstead doesn't exist
anymore; it's not used, and is in some cases literally gone. So, that's pretty
much the chronology, that brings you up to date. Norfolk
Southern takes over about 2015 and they've been operating this line ever
since. But it's interesting to see that there were parallel things that were
occurring both to the New Jersey Cut-Off and to the Pennsylvania Cut-Off. So what we're
going to do is we're going to jump in the car. I'm going to give you a little bit
of a Cook's Tour to show you where the Cut-Off was. It's going to be difficult to
really tell; you'll have to use your imagination. But we'll see if we can at
least give you an idea of where the section here, the ascending grade between
New Milford and Hallstead, actually ran. Okay, so we're going to go from this spot and take you for a trip along the Cut-Off, the ascending grade. We're actually going in the direction from New Milford towards Hallstead. The grade is just off to our left and then we go through a spot here where
it's gone. But it would have been very close to the road here on the left-hand side
in this open area. I believe it continued...well, we know it's
still on the left-hand side of the road, since it would have been torn out
roughly about 1990-ish or so. These housing units are new since then. It would have crossed here. There would
have been some sort of underpass; this would been one of the ones that
was condemned and abandoned. I'm not sure if this is Salt Lick Creek or
not, but it has a number of different tributaries. And you can see ahead, the grade crossing
for the original line. At this point, the two rail lines were about 700 feet apart;
that's a rough guess. Up on the left here is where the
line would be: the Cut-Off. Just beyond the telephone pole. And here it crossed. And you can see off to the left here
what appears to be the remnants of the underpass. The railroad would have been
above us here, crossing from the left side of the road to the right side of
the road, which is where it will be from here on in. Once again, the old line, the original
line, is further to our right, a hundred, no more than two hundred yards or so on our
right, farther down below. Now here we're going
to enter into a gully, or a low spot, where the Cut-Off is to our right.
There would have been two tracks, but the embankment is gone. Clearly there's
nothing here. There's not even a sign of it per se, other
than there's a space. But you wouldn't know--if you didn't know that the line was
here, there'd be no way you would ever know that there was a set of railroad
tracks right at this spot. Okay, here we are at what may be the site
of the October 19, 1927 wreck of train No. 28, which was a local train which ran from
Buffalo to Binghamton, through Hallstead, which is a couple miles--three miles
actually--in this direction, and then would have continued, had it not wrecked
here, to New Milford, and its last stop was scheduled to be Scranton. So what happens on the 19th of October
is that train 28 leaves Hallstead around 6 pm, and it's traveling
eastbound. You can say actually southbound, but eastbound in this
direction here, towards Scranton, towards New Milford, and it hits a washout. There
is a stream nearby. Not sure if that is exactly where it would have
occurred. But we're at the side of a hill, so it's possible with lots of rain that
it's cascading down the side of the hills and there's a washout. The train, the engine, goes into the washout, where either the tracks are gone or
they've done one of these things, and both the the engineer and the fireman
are killed. The account from the New York Times from the next day says that "Two
men were killed when the engine, a milk car, and three express cars..."--express
cars meaning like baggage cars basically--"of a Lackawanna passenger train, bound from
Binghamton to Scranton, ran into a washout three miles from Hallstead,
Pennsylvania." That would be about here. And this will be on the ascending grade.
So this would be approximately where that would have
occurred. "The engineer Newton L. Esterbrook and his fireman Luke P. Munroe, both of
Elmra, were crushed to death. None of the passengers were seriously injured." It was
a passenger train. There were passenger cars behind with an engine, coal tender,
a milk car, and then an express car. Well, I think it was like three express cars,
and then there were passenger cars behind that. The passenger cars
don't end up going down the embankment. Presumably what happened was that the
the engine went in that direction, because of where we're located, just the
terrain here. "Some of those on the wreck train arrived
to Scranton late tonight." Meaning the day before this was printed
in the Times. "Joseph Bradley of this city..." --meaning Scranton--"...told of his rescue from
one of the cars which plunged into the engine: 'I was sitting on the safe
in the Express car'--I assume it was literally a safe
with money in it--'We were going about 40 miles an hour and suddenly the emergency
brake was applied by the engineer and the train came to a sudden stop, and then
lurched forward again. I was thrown along with the safe to one end of the
car, and I knew we dropped. Then I lost my bearings from the bump on the head and
didn't know much more until I felt some men carrying me up.' And Bradley said that
the washout was between twenty and thirty feet deep. And they talk about
Louis Carney and John Gilhooly, and they said they "Hung on to the brink of the
washout as the train was wrecked. Both were found buried under trunks and
traveling bags, but were not hurt. Lucius Freeman of Binghamton, who was a
passenger, said that a number of the passengers were thrown from their seats
and injured, but none seriously. The Lackawanna actually had a comment about this,
saying that "At 6:30, when the tracks gave way
underneath the train, engine and three or four express cars sank about 15 or 20
feet...and the passenger cars did not go into the washout and
no passengers were injured." Well, that's debatable. Also, there's an account
that the Lackawanna said that fog played a role, which doesn't really make
any sense. Maybe to the extent that maybe that the engineer might have been able to see the washout ahead of them, but we don't know
exactly how the washout presented itself. It's possible
that the tracks may have looked normal, but the washout may have
taken away the dirt underneath, and we don't know. The engineer
didn't survive, so we we don't have that account, and we don't know what happened. All we know is that the train left the tracks and went down the embankment. So, was this the result of, can we say, that there's issues with this
particular ascending grade because of construction problems, being in a
swamp? Salt Lick Creek is down below here, but there are tributaries to it nearby. Was it
possible that during a heavy storm that that would have undermined the railroad? We don't know. I was unable to get a copy
of the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, report of the accident.
That would have been helpful at least to the extent and would have given us more details. So,
this is the wreck from 1927. It takes place only a little over a week after
the Yankees defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the '27 World Series in four
games. Notable for Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig. Murderers Row are part of that team,
considered probably the best team that was ever put on the field in any
year, individual year, by any team in history in American baseball at least.
So, we're done in this neck of the woods. Our next stop, and final stop, is that
we're going to Binghamton and rejoin Josh Stull. JOSH: I can send you this photo and you can
put it in there. CHUCK: Okay, sure, seriously. Yeah, you can, that's fine, yeah. JOSH: Guglie.... There's a train. CHUCK: Alright. Okay, it's good timing. Here we are in Binghamton, New York at
the station, the Lackawanna station built in 1901. The Norfolk Southern train is westbound
on what was the old Erie Railroad. The tracks in the foreground are from the
Lackawanna, former Lackawanna Railroad. You can see that how close the two
railroads are here. And when the two railroads merged in 1960, actually
starting as early as 1958, they did some track consolidations, which had the
Lackawanna give up it's right-of-way west of Vestal, which is I'm going to say is
about 10 miles west of here. So this track in the foreground here is a
dead-end spur, and the line has been cut back since then, so that the Norfolk
Southern freight that's passing is on a through line, whereas the
Lackawanna, the former Lackawanna, is a a dead end. What else did I want to talk about? I'm
gonna hand it over to Josh while I think about what else I wanted to cover.
He wants to talk about this big thing that's over here. JOSH: Thanks, Chuck. So, this is the Marconi Tower, erected in 1913, and it was erected
to test telephonic messages on passing Lackawanna railroad trains. So they have a
nice little placard that they erected there. But still standing, and I think if
I remember correctly, Chuck, you want to talk about your shirt and the connection with New York. CHUCK: Yeah, and I also remember what I was going to talk about before
the shirt. I wanted to talk about the the cut-off that never got built and
that was the Nichols Cut-Off. Not Nicholson, but Nichols Cut-Off, and the reason
why it was called Nichols is because there's a town in--I guess it would be a
city or town in--New York that's west of here and that cut-off would have gone
from Clarks Summit to Nichols and would have cut off 20 miles, 21 miles I think it was. There were a number of issues, not the least of which was how much it would
have cost, but it would have bypassed here at Binghamton, and this is such
a large city, relatively speaking. A little bit of a factoid: Binghamton is
the largest city in the State of New York that does not have passenger rail
service. So which kind of begs the question: Why doesn't it? And there have
been proposals to do rail service here, even Amtrak. My personal feeling is
they're still waiting for the Cut-Off in New Jersey to be opened so that you can go
via Scranton rather than, I mean, today you could run a train between here and
Port Jervis and New Jersey via the old Erie Railroad back there. But
there really has been no real serious consideration given to that. So it may be that they'll have to wait for the Cut-Off, the New
Jersey Cut-Off, to be reactivated. Yeah, I was going to talk about my shirt. First
of all, this is our first recording of any type in the State of New Jersey.
So I have a new, well, it's in New York... Did I say New Jersey? I'm still thinking
New Jersey. In the state of New York. And so I have in New York Yankees shirt
on. You could say, well, why didn't he pick the New York Mets, or some other team? Well,
I'm a long-time Yankee fan. I saw Mickey Mantle play, Roger Maris, Whitey
Ford, as a kid though. But, of course, I would hope I would have been a kid at
that time. But there's also a connection between the Yankees and the Lackawanna.
They used to run trains from here; they used to run trains from Cornell for
Yankee specials; Scranton is a big, big town for the Yankees. Of course their AAA farm team, the Railriders, is located in Scranton-Wilkes-Barre. Triple A is basically the next step down
from the major leagues. So there's an historic connection between the
Lackawanna and the Yankees. So I had to mention that. I imagine people are
looking at me and wondering when's he going to talk about the
Yankees? What actually happened was I ran out of shirts. I try to vary my wardrobe and eventually gets to the point, well, what am I gonna wear? So I
figured, what the heck, we're going to New York, let me put a New York Yankees shirt
on. Was there anything else I wanted to talk about? JOSH: Nope, I think you covered it. CHUCK: We've covered it. Oh, I know what we were talking about there's one more thing, which I failed to
mention, and this is going back to near the beginning of the video at Clarks Summit:
both of the cut-offs were originally built with no grade crossings. That's one
thing they had in common. I forgot to mention that, so I just had to mention
that. So, this is the end of Part 25. I want to thank you, Josh. You've been a
really good sport about doing this. We finally got together and got to do
our jaunt. We've covered quite a bit, really, certainly geographically
we've covered a lot. But a lot of information as well. So, thank you. JOSH: Thank you. CHUCK: Oh well, thank you. So, this is the end of Part 25 on the Lackawanna Cut-Off. I hope you look
forward to Part 26 on the Lackawanna Cut-Off. [Loud sound of slack on the train.] Well, that was like an exclamation point.
