The upper level of my two-level layout is all narrow gauge, depicting a portion of the former Denver & Rio Grande Western’s Fourth Division line in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
Upstate NY
Erie Lackawanna in Letchworth State Park, NY
One of my favorite railfanning locations was the Portageville iron bridge, on the Erie Lackawanna (ex Erie) line connecting Hornell and Buffalo, spanning the Genesee River in Letchworth State Park, just west of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. My friend Larry introduced me to the location, and we visited it several times while staying in the park for church retreats. The tracks were accessible by scrambling up a slope from the park road. On the west side just above the road was an S curve – great for photos – and on the east side was a passing siding – but you had to cross the trestle to get there. And it was 820 feet long and 235 feet down to the river.
Letchworth State Park has been called the “Grand Canyon of the East”, where the Genesee cuts through the limestone and shales of the Niagara Escarpment, the same formation that forms the caprock of Niagara Falls. There are three falls (Lower, Middle and Upper) in the park, with riverside trails, and the Portageville bridge is just above the Upper Falls. If you have never visited the park, it is definitely worth the trip.
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2017 update: The old Portageville bridge had outlived its usefulness, especially by limiting traffic to 10 mph and requiring lighter weight cars than today’s standard 286,000 lb. cars. In 2015, the new owner, Norfolk Southern, began construction of a new span, the Genesee Arch bridge, parallel to and about 75 feet south of the old bridge. The bridge was completed in December 2017, a few months after these photos were taken, and the old Portageville bridge was dismantled over 3 months, with completion in March 2018. There is a very detailed feature article on the project in the February 2019 issue of Trains magazine.
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Penn Central in Churchville, NY
Churchville, a town about 15 miles west of Rochester, was another favorite railfanning spot for Larry and me. About 3 miles east of Churchville was Chili Junction (Control Point 37), where the west end of West Shore line of the New York Central’s bypass around Rochester met the NYC main line from Rochester. Just west of CP37 were the abutments of the abandoned flyover of the West Shore over the NYC main, when the two were competing railroads until the 1940s. Both locations were great for railfanning. These photos were taken in 1968, 1969, and 1970 –after the merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroads in February 1968.
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Lehigh Valley in Upstate NY
The Lehigh Valley Railroad had a double-track main line through upstate NY, through Geneva and passing just south of Rochester, on its route from the New York/Jersey City area to Buffalo, NY. Unlike the New York Central, the physical plant of the Lehigh Valley, even its main line, was in serious decay in the 1960s, as could be seen at its large yard at Manchester, at the quiet facilities in Rochester off Mt Hope Avenue, and at the dilapidated depot at Rochester Junction. Here are some photo memories of those locations.
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For more photos of the Lehigh Valley at Manchester NY, check out the Manchester page at alpharail.
Background: The Lehigh Valley Railroad connected New York/Jersey City with Buffalo NY via eastern Pennsylvania and central upstate NY. Several other roads built competing lines through the same regions between New York and Buffalo, including Erie, Lackawanna, and via a longer but flatter route, the New York Central. After 1956, the LV’s last profitable year, the LV began a decline which ended in a bankruptcy filing in June 1970, three days after Penn Central filed for bankruptcy. Conrail took over the LV assets on April 1, 1976, and afterward most of the track through upstate New York was abandoned.
Other Locations in Western Upstate NY
In the summer of 1969, my friend Larry and I headed east from Rochester to the DeWitt Yard, a major classification hump yard in Syracuse on the Penn Central (former NYC). Check out alpharail for photos from our trip.
After DeWitt yard, we went on a search for the Hoosac Tunnel, but found Mechanicville NY, just north of Albany, on the way. Mechanicville had a great collection of D&H, and Boston and Maine power, with some Erie Lackawanna and Penn Central thrown in; click here for photos from that location. We never made it to the Hoosac Tunnel.
D&H in Whitehall, NY
My family passed through Whitehall NY on a September 1964 trip to New England, and my gracious parents stopped and let me wander about the yard. It was my first introduction to the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, and their beautifully painted diesels. Whitehall had some interesting features which would make for nice scenes on an HO scale layout. Here is what I captured in 1964, using Kodak slide film that I bummed from Dad; based on my Google satellite view search, it appears that most of these structures are gone today.
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Background: The Delaware & Hudson RR began in the early 1800’s in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, and expanded over the years into New York state and eventually to Montreal in 1907. Like many railroads in the northeast, declining revenues in the 1950s and 1960s led to decaying infrastructure, as is evident in these photos. In spite of seeking merger partners in the 1960s and 1970s, none was found. With the formation of Conrail in 1976, the D&H expanded to Buffalo, Philadelphia and Washington DC via trackage rights over other lines, but this was not enough to avoid takeover by Guilford Transportation in 1984. Bankruptcy followed, and then sale to Canadian Pacific in 1991; CP absorbed the D&H completely in 2010.