Passing sidings on the Montclair-Booton Line Locations

[Lackawanna565]

What are there locations? I found one. Forget the name of the town. I have the video saved on Youtube. I'm trying to find the others. I did a Google search. Like always. Everything I'm looking for didn't come up.

[ns3010]

The only passing siding is in Lincoln Park, but it is rarely used.

[Lackawanna565]

That's the one I found. I thought there were others.

[Idiot Railfan]

The Lincoln Park siding was used extensively during the years after the Montclair Connection opened. An expanded schedule resulted in a mid-morning meet and even one in the afternoon until the schedule was modified. The meets ended with service cuts under the Christie Administration, and the off-peak trains west of MSU were eliminated.

The siding was also used in the mid-1990s when Conrail hauled coal jimmies as part of the excavation to create wetlands in Wayne to offset lands lost to I-287 a few miles away.

Going waaaaaaay back, the Lincoln Park siding was the place to be during the final years of the Erie Lackawanna, when most of the freight traffic was shifted through the Scranton Division. There were meets of 100-car freight trains several times a day. Sometimes they'd be held on the siding during the morning or evening commuter rushes. Pushers were often coupled to the rear of eastbounds at Lincoln Park to get them over the Great Notch grade. That continued a couple years into Conrail until all through freights eventually came off the line with the closing of the Cutoff, around 1979, I believe.

[ACeInTheHole]

Wellp, yes, since in a fit of boredom I ended up riding the whole Montclair Boonton line from Newark Broad Street to Denville today (had to pay off a parking ticket in Montclair and decided to keep going west since 1001s arrival was convenient for the purpose), I can tell you the only passing siding I observed was the Lincoln Park one.

[Suburbanite]

@Idiot Railfan
What off-peak trains west of MSU were cut by the Christie Administration?????
I'ved on that line for thirty years, and I don't recall any train eastbound from Denville after 9 a.m. or Westbound past Great Notch before 2:45 p.m. (the next is at 4:17 p.m.) I don't think they've had any mid-day service on that line since sometime well before 1980, when I first rode it. By single-tracking the whole line, rather than leaving just the bottleneck between Great Notch and Mountain View, (which was already a stupid move—i.e., abandoning even one-track through Paterson along I-80) they pretty much condemned it to commuter service only.

[CNJGeep]

@Idiot Railfan
What off-peak trains west of MSU were cut by the Christie Administration?????
I'ved on that line for thirty years, and I don't recall any train eastbound from Denville after 9 a.m. or Westbound past Great Notch before 2:45 p.m. (the next is at 4:17 p.m.) I don't think they've had any mid-day service on that line since sometime well before 1980, when I first rode it. By single-tracking the whole line, rather than leaving just the bottleneck between Great Notch and Mountain View, (which was already a stupid move—i.e., abandoning even one-track through Paterson along I-80) they pretty much condemned it to commuter service only.

They did, and I rode them in, if I recall correctly, March of 2008. I don't recall the train numbers OTOH, but 1029 seems to ring a bell. Transferred at MSU. 3 cars going out, and as many passengers. The inbound train (four Comet Is!) was carrying about 50 by the time it discharged at MSU.

EDIT: I was close, the train number was 1025
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[Chrisgr]

Train 1025 would have been at Lincoln Park at 12:47PM and train 1029 was 2:47PM at Lincoln Park.

[Suburbanite]

Those two would both be Westbound trains from the numbers. What were the Eastbound trains and times?

How many years did they run for?

—Darn it, now that I've moved to Mountain Lakes, I could have used those trains!

[Chrisgr]

Eastbound at Lincoln Park was the 1024 at 10:47AM and 1028 at 1:47PM. There also was the westbound 1021 at 10:46AM. Not sure how many years this lasted, but it was the early 2000s. In the late 90s there was westbound train 1077 which would be at Lincoln Park at 2:46. That was before Midtown Direct. After Midtown Direct started it was the 1029.

[ACeInTheHole]

Train 1025 would have been at Lincoln Park at 12:47PM and train 1029 was 2:47PM at Lincoln Park.

Sounds like they replaced 1029 with 1001. 2:46 MSU departure. You have to wonder if some kind of electrification and double tracking project would create a "if you build it, they will come" scenario. Then you also theoretically open the door for something like a 6800 series train out of Penn Station, run it like the Port Jervis expresses, right to Dover, mode change there, then local stops to Hackettstown. Would somethin like that be feasible?

[blocksignal]

I concur with Chris. There was passenger service after the morning rush and before the evening rush. And as a matter of point it in fact was the exact same train doing a total of 2 round trips - Eastbound, Westbound, then again Eastbound, Westbound, and done. And when I say the exact same train I am going by the Locomotive number on its number board. I know because I took it from MSU to Dover when it headed Westbound and took it back to MSU from Dover as an Eastbound one day. This was on my vacation from my job in either April 2009 or 2010. I cannot quite remember which year but that midday service did in fact exist on the NJT Montclair-Booton line.

Blocksignal.

[nick11a]

As a sidenote, the only train to use the siding now is the NS H02; except it doesn't meet any train, bar the occasional extra. The dispatcher almost always lines it through the siding so as to keep the rails in use.

As for the mid-day ridership, almost nobody rode it. I rode it a few times, in 2003 and in 2007, and I was almost always the only person on the train. As much as I hated to see the service be cut, it made sense.

[riffian]

H02 goes that far East only once a week though, right?

[nick11a]

H02 goes that far East only once a week though, right?

Sometimes twice a week, sometimes once. Tuesdays and Thursdays are historically the more likely days for them to go up there. These days, they only go as far as Mountain View to gain access to the Pompton and Totowa Industrial Tracks.