Susquehanna Connecting Railroad

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Susquehanna Connecting Railroad
legal form Corporation
founding 1896
resolution 198_
Seat Dunmore , Pennsylvania ,United StatesUnited States
Branch Rail transport

The Susquehanna Connecting Railroad (SC; AAR -reporting mark: SUSC) was a railroad company in the northeast of the US state Pennsylvania . The subsidiary of the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad operated an approximately 12.2 km long railway line south of Scranton in the Wyoming Valley from 1896 , which was mainly used for the transport of anthracite coal until the 1940s . Part of the route still exists today to connect an industrial park and has been owned by Lucerne County since the SC was dissolved in the early 1980s .

history

In the 1880s, the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad (NYS & W) acquired mining rights for anthracite coal mining near Scranton, which were soon claimed by subsidiaries and licensees. NYS & W signed contracts with other mining companies in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre region to transport coal to New Jersey . NYS & W built five short branch lines to connect the coal washers to the rail network . However, these routes were neither directly connected with each other nor with the NYS & W main line, which ended around 75 km east of Scranton, which meant that the NYS & W was responsible for transporting coal to other railroad companies, above all the Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H) and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (DL&W), was instructed. From January 1894, the gap was significantly shortened by the NYS & W subsidiary Wilkes-Barre and Eastern Railroad (WB&E), which opened a line from Stroudsburg at the western end of the NYS & W main line to Kingston near Wilkes-Barre. However, this was not connected to the short NYS&W branches around Scranton.

Map with the routes of the NYS & W, WB&E and SC

On December 18, 1896, NYS & W therefore founded another subsidiary, the Susquehanna Connecting Railroad (SC), in order to connect the isolated NYS & W sections with the WB & E route. From February 26, 1897, the SC rented these five NYS & W branch lines, on which more than 750,000 tons of coal were transported per year at that time, and began to build their own route. The starting point was initially Paddy's Land , later called Suscon Junction, from the WB & E route in Pittston Township , about 20 km northeast of Wilkes-Barre. From there the SC route was led into the valley of the Lackawanna River to Moosic . Southeast of Moosic existed in Hillside Junction rail connections to routes of the Erie Railroad and the Lackawanna and Wyoming Valley Railroad . In Moosic, Moosic Junction (sometimes also called Jermyn Junction ) was the SC's largest train station. A short branch line ( Jermyn Branch ) led from there to nearby lines of the DL&W, the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the New York, Ontario and Western Railway and in particular to NYS & W Jermyn No. 2 Breaker branch in Old Forge . To the northeast, the SC line was to be continued to Jessup , where the Winton Branch was the longest and northernmost of the NYS & W railways. Until 1898, however, the SC line was only extended as the Minooka Branch about two kilometers to a line of the D&H. The total length of the SC routes was about 12.2 km (7.56 miles ). With the opening of the first section on April 1, 1897, WB&E took over the management of the SC. From the beginning, only goods traffic was carried out and no passenger traffic was offered.

The acquisition of NYS & W by the Erie Railroad in 1898 ended the expansion of the SC. At the same time, the freight routes changed, because a significant part of the coal transports was now not handed over to the WB&E, but to the Erie Railroad. The management of the SC by the WB&E formally ended on December 31, 1917, but WB&E and SC were also operated jointly under the direction of the United States Railroad Administration and the original condition was restored in the spring of 1920. The WB&E filed for bankruptcy in 1937 and closed its own business in 1939. The transports on the SC took over from April 1, 1938 the Erie Railroad via exclusive trackage rights .

The Minooka Branch was abandoned in 1936. On May 15, 1941, the SC also requested the closure of their Jermyn Branch including Moosic Junction and the NYS & W the closure of their adjoining route after coal mining at Old Forge was abandoned in May 1938. The application was granted on July 18, 1941. The eight kilometer long section from Hillside Junction to Suscon remained, which continued to be served by the Erie and, from 1960, by the Erie Lackawanna Railroad (EL). At the end of 1975, EL, which has been under insolvency administration since 1972, announced that it would cease operations there. On April 1, 1976, the services were taken over by Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail). After NYS & W had been under bankruptcy administration since 1976, it was reorganized in the early 1980s. As part of this, the SC was dissolved.

With the dissolution of the SC, the remaining infrastructure fell to Lucerne County . The Pocono Northeast Railway (PNER) took over freight traffic to Grimes Industrial Park in 1981 , after Conrail withdrew from numerous branch lines in the Scranton / Wilkes-Barre area. After PNER went bankrupt in 1993, the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad (DL) ran the business for a few months before the Luzerne and Susquehanna Railway (L&SR) took over.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Robert E. Mohowski: The New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad . JHU Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8018-7222-8 , pp. 43-48 (English).
  2. ^ A b Interstate Commerce Commission (Ed.): Interstate Commerce Commission Reports: Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States. Valuation reports . tape 33 , 1931, pp. 506-508 (English).
  3. ↑ Employer Status Determination - Termination of Coverage. (PDF) Railroad Retirement Board , December 1, 2008, accessed May 14, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Interstate Commerce Commission (Ed.): Finance Docket No. 13287 Susquehanna Connecting Railroad Company et al Abandonment . July 18, 1941 (English).
  5. ^ EL Railroad to Drop Area Lines . In: Times Leader . December 11, 1975, p. 3 (English): “A list of railroad lines tentatively slated to be dropped early next year in the area has been announced by the trustees of the bankrupt Erie-Lackawanna Railroad [... they] also announced that the following trackage rights will be abandoned [...] Susquehanna Connecting Railroad from Hillside Junction to Suscon ”
  6. ↑ Finance Docket 28098 - The New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad Company, Debtor (Walter G. Scott, trustee) - Plan of Liquidation (1980-12-22) . In: Interstate Commerce Commission (Ed.): Interstate Commerce Commission Reports, April 1980 - October 1981 . tape 363 , p. 794-807 (English): “Susquehanna also proposed to abandon the line owned by its subsidiary, the [SC], extending from [Suscon to Hillside]. The Suscon Branch is currently operated by Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) ”