Membership Meeting - August 2022 - The Susie-Q, East to West

From its earliest origins as the New Jersey Midland Railway in the 1870s, the New York, Susquehanna & Western has been an integral piece of the northern New Jersey rail network. Stretching from the Hudson River in Jersey City and Edgewater westward to Stroudsburg, PA and beyond via its subsidiary, the Wilkes-Barre & Eastern, the NYS&W formed a vital east-west link across the state.
Despite cutting its west end back to Hainesburg, NJ in 1941, the railroad continued to flourish during World War II. Using funds from the influx of wartime traffic, NYS&W became the first Class I railroad in the U.S. to fully dieselize (accomplished in June of 1945). Following the recession of 1957 and the abandonment of the connecting Lehigh & New England in 1961, the NYS&W abandoned its line west of the Lehigh & Hudson River connection in Sparta, NJ. Commuter service ended entirely in 1966, and the railroad’s limited freight operations were cut back in 1968 from Sparta to Oak Ridge and again in 1971 from Oak Ridge to Butler. The NYS&W operated as a down-on-its-luck shortline into the 1980s, when it was famously revived by Walter Rich and the Delaware Otsego Corporation as a powerful Class II regional carrier.
This presentation, covering the railroad from east to west, showcases never-before-seen images from the NYS&W’s earliest diesels in the 1940s through the railroad’s first decade under Delaware Otsego ownership. Carolyn Hoffman and Jon Berkemeyer, authors of a forthcoming book series on the NYS&W, provide a thorough look at the railroad’s locations and motive power during these tumultuous decades. They are joined by Rudy Garbely, who will help to present locations and photos from future books in this series covering the western portions of the “Susie-Q”.