Lackawanna Cutoff

Of all the commuters in America, residents of a small town in eastern Pennsylvania spend the most time behind the wheel, according to the Census Bureau.

Commuters living in the area of East Stroudsburg, a town near the New Jersey border, averaged 40.6 minutes from home to work or vice versa, according to the 2008 Census report.

That’s a lot longer than the nationwide average of 25.5 minutes.

Roger DeLarco, president of East Stroudsburg council, said that’s because many of the locals travel to jobs in the New York City area, more than 60 miles east as the crow flies. He said that 10,000 people live in his town, but three times that number commute to New York from the greater area of East Stroudsburg.

In a reversal of the trend it appears that some of the abandoned Lackawanna Cutoff is finally being rehabilitated!
I’m not holding my breath for the full restoration to Scranton, PA, but this is a good start.

The Unofficial Web Page for the Lackawanna Cutoff Passenger Rail Project
Click on picture above to find out about the Penn Jersey Rail Coalition
Another Lackawanna Cutoff Page

The Great Lackawanna Cutoff – Then & Now

Railroad.net discussion of the Lackawanna Cutoff

Scranton’s Lackawanna Station

Lackawanna Cutoff from the Wiki
Also known as “New Jersey Cutoff”

Six Rail Station Sites
From the Pocono Record

Delaware Water Gap
From the National Park Service

See more stories on the Lackawanna

https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/lackawanna-railroad/

 

 

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OSWEGO AND SYRACUSE RAILROAD

This Company was formed April 29, 1839, and the route was surveyed during the summer of that year. The Company was fully organized March 25, 1847. The road was opened in October, 1848, thirty-five miles and a half in length. In 1872 it passed under the management of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company. It finally merged with the DL&W in 1945.

DL&W in Oswego

The Lackawanna had a coal dock in Oswego, but it was older and not too large. Many Great Lakes boats were too long and too deep for loading at the Oswego dock. Lots of times, coal loads had to go to the Pennsylvania for loading at Sodus Point. The matter of extra dredging at Oswego was up but the Railroad did not seem disposed to spend the extra money to dredge to a sufficient depth and length to accommodate the modern boats.

See link for more stories about the Lackawanna

https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/lackawanna-railroad/

 

A Caboose in Dillwyn, Virginia

John Cowgill's Literature Site

This  is  a  caboose  from  the  Buckingham  Branch  Railroad  in  Dillwyn,  Virginia.

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Pacemaker service

Pacemaker service was effectively ended when the Central introduced “Early Bird” service, which started around 1956/57. This didn’t last long itself, as the introduction of Flexi-van service then carried LCL

When the Pacemaker cars were delivered they were used only on Pacemaker freight service routes. But that does not mean they didn’t appear in other trains or that they were not mixed with other cars in Pacemeker trains.

The Pacemaker service train NB-3 provided overnight service from New York to Buffalo. But it also took cars for other destinations. It was not a dedicated train for the NY-Buffalo service.

It would be interesting to know if any trains of all Pacemaker cars were seen in regular service. I believe they moved along with regular cars from the beginning of the service. TI’s hard to imagine how a solid train would occur other than for publicity photos. Do we have any non-PR photos that show a train with only Pacemaker cars ?

When did the service end? Depends on what you mean by “the service”. LCL service declined rapidly in the 60’s and was almost gone at the time of the PC merger. I’m not sure when dedicated trains were discontinued, but the overnight New York-Buffalo service is not shown in the 1954 timetable.

What happened to the cars when the service ended? They were used as ordinary box cars.

Did the cars remain in their old colours for long? Yes, until they were in a shop and really needed a paint job. They slowly disappeared like any other old car.

See more great short stories

https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/a-collection-of-short-stories-about-railroads-book-two/

 

Plimmon H. Dudley (1843-1924) – metallurgist

Dr. Plimmon H. Dudley, the New York Central Railroad’s expert on rail metallurgy, would also accurately predict the weather. He was considered the “scientist of rails”. He died in 1924 at age 81. He had joined the New York Central in 1880 and had lived in the Hotel Commodore since it was built.

INTEREST IN FLAWLESS RAILS:
Steel men expressed great interest yesterday in the announcement made by President A.H. Smith of the New York Central Railroad that the road’s staff of specialists under the direction of Dr. Plimmon H. Dudley had discovered the cause and remedy for the hidden flaws in steel rails.

HOW ONE MAN HELPED MAKE RAILROADS SAFER; Inventions of Dr. Plimmon H. Dudley Point Out Roadbed and Track Defects and Make Steel Rails Impervious to Cold
By JOHN WALKER HARRINGTON.
February 17, 1924,
EVERY one of us who slips into a Pullman berth at night and wakes up safe and sound in a distant city owes a debt to Dr. Plimmon H. Dudley’s half century of the study of the steel rail. As his eighty-first birthday approaches, science and transportation are preparing to do him honor.

Gifts can become unworkable in many ways. Consider the Dudley Professorship of Railroad Engineering at Yale. The chair was created in 1923 with a $US152,679 gift from Plimmon H.Dudley, a New York Central Rail engineer.

His express desire, he said, was that his research into railway safety be continued, in particular in connection with the development and improvement of designs of rails, roadbeds and crossties.

But railway engineering lost its lustre as a hot academic topic. And the professorship sat vacant for more than 70 years.

“I was kind of stumped as to what to do with this chair,” Yale’s president, Richard Levin, admitted.

Then Yale realized that the steam engines and wood ties of yesterday had been replaced by today’s magnetic levitation and superconductivity. So since 2002, Stephen Morse, an engineer who has studied urban transportation and switching strategies for the control of uninhabited vehicles, has been the Dudley Professor of Engineering at Yale.

See more stories like this one

https://penneyandkc.wordpress.com/a-collection-of-short-stories-about-railroads-book-two/

Great ways to boost your self-discipline

Jeremy McGilvrey

Greatness is inside all of us. All we need is just to work hard and do everything in our power to master it. That’s where the need for self-discipline comes into play. Without the proper self-discipline and a sense of accomplishment, you will not be able to reach the results and experience that you always wanted. It will be a true challenge all the time for sure, but, as long as you create the best disciplinary methods and stick to them, you can get excellent results.

Practice makes perfect : If you want to have self-discipline, you need to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. That’s why we say that practice makes perfect because it will help you find the right approach and rewards in this regard. Nothing is impossible as long as you take your time and focus on results, in the end, the experience will…

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