Lehigh and Hudson River Railway
The Lehigh and Hudson River Railway (LHR, L&HR) was an American railroad company based in the states of New Jersey , New York, and Pennsylvania . The company was based in Warwick (New York).
Route network
The route had a length of 150 km and reached from Belvidere (New Jersey) to Maybrook (New York). The company had route usage rights from Belvidere to Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania . There were no secondary lines.
From the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad and the Norfolk Southern only the section between Sparta Junction and Hudson Junction is used today.
history
In 1860 the Warwick Valley Railroad was founded to build a line from Warwick to Greycourt (New York) , where there was a connection to the New York and Erie Railroad (later the Erie Railroad ). The line was built with the broad gauge of 1,829 mm (6 foot) like the Erie Railroad and was completed in 1862. Until the line was converted to standard gauge in 1880 , the railroad used locomotives and wagons from the Erie Railroad.
In order to develop iron mines in the southwest, the line was extended as the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad to Belvidere (New Jersey) on the Delaware River .
In 1882 the two companies merged to form the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway.
After the Poughkeepsie Bridge had been built over the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie , the line was extended to Maybrook in 1890. At the other end of the route, the Delaware River was also crossed with a bridge. The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway agreed on mutual route usage rights . Thus, the (PRR) obtained rights over the L&HR to use the Poughkeepsie Bridge, and the L&HR received rights between Belvidere and Phillipsburg.
At first, agricultural products were the most important cargo, but large volumes of coal were soon added. The most important customer on the route was a mine and a grinder from the New Jersey Zinc Co. near Franklin (New Jersey) .
With the acquisition of the Central New England Railway in 1904 by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (NH), the L&HR became a "bridge route". At the instigation of the NH, the L&HR was bought by several of the large railway companies to ensure the connection of the NH with these routes. The only major change in ownership between 1929 and 1975 was the 1950 sale of the 20 percent stake in the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (owner of the Lehigh and New England Railroad ) to the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the PRR. The ownership structure before the takeover by Conrail in 1975 was as follows:
- 16.75% - Central Railroad of New Jersey
- 13.44% - Reading Company
- 14.43% - Penn Central
- 32.73% - Erie Lackawanna Railroad
- 22.16% - Lehigh Valley Railroad
- 0.49% - other
With the merger of the Erie Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in 1960, through traffic to New Haven shifted to the former route of the Erie Railroad. When Penn Central was established in 1968 , further traffic from the New England States was shifted to the now common routes of the former New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The capacity utilization of L&HR sank considerably, as a result of which it had to file for bankruptcy on April 18, 1972. The little traffic that remained came to an end when the Poughkeepsie Bridge fire in 1974. L&HR ownership passed to Conrail on April 1, 1976.
literature
- Bobo Pennisi: The Northeast Railroad Scene, Vol.2: The Lehigh & Hudson River , Railroad Avenue Enterprise, Flanders (NJ) 1977
Web links
- Route map. Archived from the original .
- fan page
- Rooster, photos
