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RE: (erielack) Railroads "That Should Never Have Been Built

> Whenever I hear a reference to something that "Never should 
> have been built" made by a contemporary in the late 
> 20th-early 21st century I kind of have to chuckle. After all 
> that is an obituary remark, not a remark from the time of the 
> planning and building. It is also ignores the entire complex 
> relationship of the entity to its environment.


"Hindsight is 20/20."  The prospects for the O&W probably seemed pretty good when it was originally built (who would have thought that Oswego would never become a huge port town? :). Also, don't forget, in those "boom times" every town wanted to build their own railroad. Many failed, many never got off the ground, and the rest eventually consolidated with neighboring railroads. Of course, built as a piecemeal entity, no one ever saw the "big picture" until they were all merged together. By that point, you had a fixed line, and now you had to figure out what the purpose of this line was going to be.


> Corporations are formed to fill a percieved market or need. 
> The world changes and some of those corporations change or 
> die. Studebaker made wagons and changed to cars and trucks. 
> Canals were technologically inferior to railroads and so were 
> supplanted by them, not a few right on the towpaths. But does 
> that mean the D&H or Erie canals should Never Have Been 
> Built? I doubt many would argue in the affirmative.


Many railroads are not around anymore because their raison d'etre no longer exists. I just got done reading the fine book "Iron Mine Railroads of Northern New Jersey" by Larry Lowenthal (is Tri-State going to reprint this gem???), which discusses the multitude of "really short railroads" in Northern NJ, most built to haul iron ore out of the NJ hillsides. Eventually, most of the lines mentioned were sucked into two roads: The CNJ, as part of its High Bridge Branch, and the DL&W, as part of its Chester Branch. The DL&W was lucky because the branch only provided a miniscule part of the line's revenue, and they were smart enough to prune the "dead branches" before it was too late - the Chester Branch was amputated south of Ledgewood in the 1930s.

But the loss of the iron ore business to the Mesabi Range on the Great Lakes is a good example of what Rusty is referring to. In the O&W's case, the big commodities were milk (which trucks quickly sapped away) and coal (which by the 1950s was already a dying commodity in the Northeast). What else did it have?

 
> Give the Old & Weary its due. The railroad changed the face 
> of the region through which it passed and operated to the 
> betterment of most everyone it connected with until 
> supplanted by new technology and cultural changes, just as it 
> sister railroads did all ove the US.

It was all about timing. If you look at today's railroads, they're constantly finding the need to reinvent themselves. The NYS&W wouldn't be around today if luck and the double-stack revolution hadn't hit. Today's NYS&W no longer has stacks, but they haul giant trains of construction debris (as do many other roads). I don't know how good railroads were back in the 50s at "innovating" in terms of hunting down new business - I think most roads tended to stick with legacy commodities (most notably coal and LCL). Piggyback was a step in the right direction, but innovation didn't happen quickly enough.

Just my $0.02.

	- Paul

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