Subject: RE: BS: More favorite railway lines
From:
GUEST
Date: 05 May 05 - 07:30 PM
Lionel Lines, indeed, Martin ~ an old favorite of mine, as well!
In terms of full-scale railroads, the old New Jersey Central RR was THE railroad of my childhood. It was part of the Baltimore & Ohio system, and once a day a B&O locomotive would zoom though our town without stopping, pulling a passenger train to New York City. The Reading Railroad was also affiliated, and we'd see their trains pass though on our tracks, too, but it was the freight and passenger trains of the NJCRR that carried our commuting workforce and the products of our local factories in and out of town several times a day every day.
When we took the train to New York, we actually only went as far as a ferry terminal in Jersey City, where everyone got off the train, boarded a boat, and made the crossing to Liberty Street in downtown Manhattan (near the Wall Street financial district, and very near the future site of the World Trade Center twin towers). Combining railroad and ferryboat travel made a special day trip just that much more of an event, every time.
Most, but not all, of the old NJCRR line survives as the Raritan Valley Line of the NJTransit system. Somewhere east of the Roselle/Roselle Park station, the new right-of-way abandons the old route through Elizabeth to Jersey City and insteads jogs north over to Newark Penn Station, where you transfer ~ not to a ferryboat any longer, but ~ to another train, the Amtrak main line, which takes you under the Hudson and into midtown, to New York's Penn Station (under the new Madison Square Garden). A little quicker, but much less glamorous, than the old itinerary.
The lovely old NJCRR Ferry Terminal building still stands on the Jersey City riverfront, a stone's throw from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; today it's part of Liberty State Park.
The Weehauken, Hoboken & Troy sounds like another long-gone New Jersey line. If it's not fictional, it probably still exists, in some diminished way, as part of the spiderweb-like NJTransit system. In fact, it could conceivably be the actual railroad featured in the recent indy film "The Station Agent," set in Hoboken, suburban/exurban Morris County, and beautiful Lake Hopatcong -- anyone know??
|
sj
