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    Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch
    Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch
    Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch
    Ebook177 pages41 minutes

    Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch

    By Robert McCue

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    For over 130 years, the Erie Railroad s Newburgh branch was a key factor in the economic and social life of the city of Newburgh, New York, and the towns that had stations along its 19-mile route between Newburgh and the Erie main line. Only five miles of this once vital rail link survive today. Looking at this lightly used rail spur today, the casual passerby would have no hint of the rich history that can be seen for only a moment from the car window. Erie Railroad s Newburgh Branch will take both dedicated and new railfans back to the days when rail travel was every town s modern mode of transport as well as its economic lifeblood. It was a simpler time, before the age of air travel and America s love affair with a new invention called the automobile.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJul 7, 2014
    ISBN9781439646052
    Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch
    Author

    Robert McCue

    Robert McCue was born and raised in Cornwall, New York. Having cultivated a lifelong interest in the region�s history, he researches and writes about the area he grew up knowing. McCue has also been a proud member of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway Historical Society for 10 years.

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      Book preview

      Erie Railroad's Newburgh Branch - Robert McCue

      collection.

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1807, a strange and wondrous new kind of ship began plying the waters of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. Instead of being powered by sail, two paddlewheels, one on each side, pulled the ship along. Where a mainmast should be was instead a smokestack. Below the smokestack, out of sight, was something few people at the time had ever seen, and something many thought was from the devil himself. A furnace boiled water to make steam—enough steam to power the paddlewheels. Two crankshafts, one attached to the paddlewheels and one to the engine, connected to a giant walking beam above deck. Watching this beam and its shafts move up and down in cadence with the speed of the ship fascinated the passengers. This ship was Robert Fulton’s Clermont, and it was the first successful steam-powered vessel. Many called it Fulton’s folly. But, by the end of the 1800s, steam power had virtually replaced sail power on all the major waterways in the world.

      For centuries, mines had been running their ore cars along a set of wooden or crude iron rails, pulled by mules. In London and Wales, early tramways—carriages pulled by horses along public streets—began running on a set of rails in the early 1800s. Steam power was beginning to come into use to pump water out of mines.

      Steam-powered machines of a different sort were soon to propel another wonder of the industrial age: the railroads—a road of iron rails to move passengers and freight for hundreds of miles. Here was a new kind of animal, because a roadbed had to be built across rivers and over (and through) mountains. It had to be solid enough to support a steam-powered engine pulling a string of carriages at the unheard-of speed of four miles per hour. The ride was far from smooth, and sparks from the engine’s smokestack showered passengers. Cars loaded with bales of cotton were placed between the engine and passengers because early steam boilers could (and often did) explode. Straps of iron were nailed to lengths of wood to form the earliest rails, but the iron could come loose and spring up through the bottom of the carriages, with deadly results. And, at the end of track came one more problem: all this had to be brought to a smooth and safe stop. Despite all this, train travel still became the preferred method of travel over bone-jarring stagecoaches and unpaved roads that were either hard and rutted or muddy and impassable. Bringing railroads into the modern age would involve a cast of heroes, heroines, villains, and unsung heroes, from the lowliest track worker up to the highest political office.

      The New York & Erie Railroad started construction in 1835 and reached Goshen, in Orange County, in 1841. When finally completed in 1851, the Erie was the longest railroad in America, stretching over an area of more than 400 miles from Piermont, on the Hudson River, to Dunkirk, along Lake Erie. One of the fateful decisions on the Erie’s route was to run it along the Delaware River, as opposed to going through Sullivan County’s Catskill Mountains. Some three decades later, the predecessor to the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad would send its route over the Catskills. But the torturous grades involved would be a headache to the railroad for all its life. The origins of the Erie go back to a young bride who was so enthusiastic about her first train trip in the South that when she returned with her new husband to their Ramapo, New York, home, her great enthusiasm made sure to catch the ear of her brother-in-law Eleazar Lord. A prominent New York captain of industry, Lord was also a supporter of Clinton’s surveys for a railroad. A bride’s enthusiasm quite literally set the wheels in motion for the Erie Railroad. Lord would go on to be the Erie’s first president.

      At the time of the Erie’s construction, rails were shipped from England. It was a very expensive and cumbersome proposition. Thankfully, this was just at the time when two brothers were trying to make a go of an iron foundry along the Lackawanna River in Pennsylvania. A deal was made to ship rails from the foundry over the mountains to the Erie. Mules pulled the first wagons of rail, and later the foundry became established enough to construct its own railroad to ship rails with. The two were the Scranton brothers, whom the city of Scranton was named after. The railroad they built was the forerunner of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, one of the Erie’s biggest rivals and the railroad the Erie would merge with to form the Erie Lackawanna Railroad in 1959.

      In 1801, businessmen from Sullivan County charted the Newburgh–Cocheton Turnpike, running between Sullivan County and the Hudson River. The turnpike opened in 1809 and was a boon to both connecting points. Sullivan’s first major commerce had been shipping logs down the Delaware River. The next major export after logging was quarrying bluestone. New York City became a major market for the durable stone for use in sidewalks and curbing. Following this was the next major commodity, coal. In 1829, the Delaware and Hudson Canal opened between the coalfields in Pennsylvania and the port of Rondout, near Kingston on the Hudson River. While the canal was a boon to towns all along it, Newburgh’s standing as a port city was seriously threatened by it. Canal boats moved at an average of four miles per hour, pulled along by mules. The advantage was not in speed but in tonnage. The largest canal boats could carry weights that American highways could not match until the 1950s. The

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