Grassroots Railroad Sports?

One of the D&H's SD45s after being returned from the Erie-Lackawanna by Conrail. Rather than give them a full paint job, the D&H simply painted over the maroon stripe with a blue stripe and applied a simple herald to the nose. Also visible is the L-shaped windshield on the engineer's side of the cab. All of the demonstrators were so equipped, and the SP tended to order this windshield style on a lot of their roadswitchers, but they were a rarity pretty much everywhere else, as a lot of railroad's didn't want to stock the extra piece of glass.

An armada of Erie-Lackawanna U34CHs at Hoboken. In the '70s, E-L needed more modern power and cars for their NJ commuter operations, but was too financially ill to make such expenditures. So the New Jersey Department of Transportation underwrote the purchase of 33 GE U34CHs, a U36C with a Head End Power generator, and 155 Comet push pull coaches built by Pullman Standard. The deal was that if Erie-Lackawanna was to declare bankruptcy and be absolved of their commuter obligations, then the equipment would revert back to NJ DOT ownership and the state would take over commuter runs. Erie-Lackawanna kept their commuter operations running until the Conrail merger, and Conrail continued to run things with the U34CHs and Comets until NJTransit took over.

The old DL&W EMU cars also remained in service well into the Conrail era.

A large number of ex-DL&W EMU cars still exist, as a lot of them were grabbed up after retirement and had the pantographs, transformers, control stands and traction motors stripped and were converted to regular coaches. The same was done to a lot of the old Reading EMU cars as well (which are easily identifiable by their odd trucks with a large circular void between axles). For places that were going for a certain look with all clerestory roof coaches, the retirement of the old EMU cars was a godsend. I saw someone asking why various tourist lines that don't have a wye strip the control stands out of the EMU cars, instead of leaving them intact and using them like a cab car in a push-pull operation, and the answer was that anything with a functional control stand is considered a locomotive by the FRA, which would mean the cars would have to pass a different FRA certification process that's more rigorous than a standard passenger car certification.

A very smokey RDC at Hoboken. Still not as bad as the ex-NYS&W RDC that I rode on the Reading & Northern this summer, which seemed to be doing it's damndest to blot out the sun anytime it accelerated.

Two of the Erie-Lackawanna's Alco C425s live near me and I have seen them many times. Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern #2453 and #2456 were formerly Erie-Lackawanna #2453 and #2456. Before Conrail was formed, E-L sold them to BCRail in British Columbia, where they lived as BCRail #803 and #806. They were sold off in the early 2000s, when Genesee Valley Transportation purchased them and sent them to Utica, where they operate a stone's throw from the old DL&W Utica Division.

The C425 was created at the behest of the E-L. They had purchased a handful of C424s, but wanted them to match the 2500hp rating of the GE U25B and EMD GP35, and so Alco installed a different generator to add the extra 100hp.

I spent my childhood within earshot of the Erie, many of these photos are places I have been multiple times. Where I lived we called it the Dreary Erie......

A D&H freight on Erie-Lackawanna rails at Waverly, PA with the ex-NYC Baldwin RF-16s on point. The D&H and the E-L's history was intertwined at various points.

When the Erie and the DL&W were originally in discussion for the merger, the D&H was also part of the discussion. The resultant three-way merger would have combined Erie's route to Chicago, the DL&W's superior mainline from New York City to Buffalo, and D&H's access to Canada and New England. But The D&H, which was relatively prosperous at the time, looked at the Erie and the DL&W's finances (the DL&W had really had it's teeth kicked in by Hurricane Diane in '55), and decided they were better off going it alone.

Then, in 1964, when N&W was making moves to acquire the Wabash and the Nickel Plate, the ICC also stipulated that the Norfolk & Western had to take on the D&H and the E-L to give the impending Penn Central merger some equal competition (Penn Central was set to be the largest transportation company in the world and no one knew just how disastrous it would be). N&W wanted nothing to do with E-L's ruinous commuter obligations, and so they held the D&H and E-L at arm's length by placing them in a holding company called DERECO (for Delaware Real Estate Company) in 1968, essentially creating the original Erie-DL&W-D&H merger.

When Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970, the federal government began scrambling to find a way to save the north eastern railroads, laying the groundwork for Consolidated Rail Corporation. Since the Erie-Lackawanna reached all the way to Chicago and was showing signs of viability, the decision was made to include the D&H in Conrail and to leave Erie-Lackawanna out to serve as a competitor to Conrail, so that Conrail didn't monopolize the market. But Hurricane Agnes in 1972 devastated the Erie-Lackawanna, destroying massive chunks of it's mainline and the E-L began taking on water again. Norfolk & Western handed a bunch of money to the D&H and it was told to sink or swim as an independent railroad, although the N&W still retained ownership. The government decided to swap out D&H and E-L, leaving D&H as the competitor to Conrail, which was laughable, since D&H was a bridge route between Canada, the eastern portion of New York and northeast Pennsylvania. The former DL&W/E-L mainline from Binghamton to Scranton was sold to D&H, and the D&H also gained trackage rights from Conrail to new terminuses at Newark, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Washington, DC, essentially doubling the D&H's size overnight.

TurnerX19 said:

I spent my childhood within earshot of the Erie, many of these photos are places I have been multiple times. Where I lived we called it the Dreary Erie......

The Weary Erie, the Dreary Erie, the Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, the Eerie Lack of Want-to, the Eerie Lack Of Money.

No northeastern railroad put on as brave a face as the Delaware & Hudson during the dark days of the '60s and '70s. One of the Morrison-Knudsen PA-4us leads a passenger train at Willsboro, NY in the fall of '76.

Three of the PA-1s at Ninevah, PA in September of '73. Since this is 2 years after the formation of Amtrak, and 1 year before the revival of the Laurentian as Amtrak's Adirondack, this is likely an excursion.

In typical Alco fashion, D&H #18 belches black smoke.

A U-boat leads a D&H southbound freight through Lanesboro, PA.

A GE U30C at Oneonta, NY.

A couple leased Canadian Pacific coaches are mixed into this D&H passenger train at Damascus, NY.

A big 6-axle U-boat leads a trio of Alco RS-36s at Starrucca

D&H #1205, one of the last two remaining Baldwin RF-16s, sits alongside Lehigh Valley C420 #411 at Sayre, PA in September of '75. In just a few more months, the #411 would be handed over to the D&H on Conveyance Day. Because the D&H doubled in trackage on Conrail's formation, they were allowed to raid the Conrail cookie jar for additional motive power, and they cherry-picked the Lehigh Valley's C420s and brand-new EMD GP38-2s, along with the Reading's GP39-2s.

A Baldwin sharknose and a snub-nosed U-boat at Binghamton. The story behind the D&H's purchase of the Baldwin RF-16s was that the D&H was sending a bunch of scrap rail and old freight cars to the scrapyard where the #1205 and #1216 were sitting, after the Monongahela had retired them, and D&H President Bruce Sterzing caught wind of this fact. Rather than take money for the rail and freight cars, he traded even for the RF-16s, had them brought back to Colonie and cleaned up and put into service. On the Alco stronghold that was the D&H (EMDs and GEs were just starting to get footholds), the Baldwins were truly outcasts and were not loved by the operating crews or maintenance crews, and so as soon as Sterzing was gone from the D&H, like literally the next day, the new management wasted no time sending them packing to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.