ARTICLE: A Railroad Named Conrail and Its Heritage!

A Railroad Named Conrail and Its Heritage!

Conrail – or Consolidated Rail Corporation – came into being in 1976 and the majority of it disappeared corporately in 1998 when the other two major eastern U. S. railroads – Norfolk Southern and CSX – acquired its assets and split the spoils, so to speak.
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The road that led to Conrail’s launch in 1976 had its beginnings in 1968 when the region’s two largest railroads merged to become PennCentral, which was a disaster from the outset, as it was an “apples and oranges” marriage of two totally dissimilar “cultures” and systems. (The only thing they seemed to be united on was painting a lot of locomotives black and applying their corporate logo.) Matters were only made worse when, a year later, government regulators forced PennCentral to accept the merging of the bankrupt New Haven Railroad into its troubled organization. Less than a year would pass before PennCentral itself declared bankruptcy!
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Two of those were the Reading Company, which I grew up with … it was my favorite, as its West Trenton main line passed where I lived during my early school-age years. Not only was there the electrified local passenger trains, there was the daily local freight — pulled by a steam locomotive known as the Camelback (see link below) — and, most exciting, the express passenger trains, including the streamlined Crusader, headed to Jersey City, New Jersey. Those trains utilized the Central Railroad of New Jersey — which served the central New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania region — tracks to get to their northern destination.
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Not to be overlooked are two railroads owned jointly … the Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Lines — which ran from Camden to Atlantic City and other southern New Jersey seaside vacation communities — and the Raritan River Railroad, which was owned by the Jersey Central and the Pennsylvania. There’s also the Lehigh Valley, which had trackage from the Lehigh Valley area up through Pennsylvania and into central and western New York state, plus the Lehigh & Hudson River, primarily a “bridge line” which ran from a large rail yard in Maybrook, New York, down to the Lehigh Valley. Once the New Haven was merged into PennCentral and traffic over the Poughkeepsie bridge fell to almost nothing, the L&HR lost most of its business.
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