Last steam runs.

Does anyone have the date, location, and loco for the last steam operations of the Erie and the DL&W?

thanks,
Scot

scottychaos wrote:Does anyone have the date, location, and loco for the last steam operations of the Erie and the DL&W?

thanks,
Scot

The last DL&W passenger run left on June 5, 1953 from Hoboken, NJ enroute to Branchville, NJ over the Boonton line. I believe the engine was #1135. I don't know anything about the Erie sorry. Might have been sometime in 1954.

blockline4180 wrote:

scottychaos wrote:Does anyone have the date, location, and loco for the last steam operations of the Erie and the DL&W?

thanks,
Scot

The last DL&W passenger run left on June 5, 1953 from Hoboken, NJ enroute to Branchville, NJ over the Boonton line. I believe the engine was #1135. I don't know anything about the Erie sorry. Might have been sometime in 1954.

Steam operations ended on the Erie mainline in late 1952. Steam lasted on Old Reliable's commuter trains in NJ until March 17th, 1954, when the last 4-6-2 was retired.

thanks!

Matt, sorry, but im not sure who you mean by "old reliable"..
are you referring to the Lackawanna?
if so, we have two conflicting dates for the last DL&W steam run..

Scot

scottychaos wrote:thanks!

Matt, sorry, but im not sure who you mean by "old reliable"..
are you referring to the Lackawanna?
if so, we have two conflicting dates for the last DL&W steam run..

Scot

No, I think he meant the Erie, although I don't remember what line was referred to as "old reliable."

OLD RELIABLE? Wasn't that the L&N. O&W was the Old Woman. But I don't remember eitherthe DL&W or the Erie being referred to as Old anything. Er, except that.

I forget which book it was stated, but the last DL&W steam was a switcher in Scranton. They simply ran it until the DL&W stopped refilling the coal dock and let it run empty.

Well by a stroke of luck I found my source... The Peterson book Trackside with DL&W has Scranton sources who worked for the DL&W state that they ran a switcher in the yards until the coal ran out, and the last fire was dropped July 22, 1953.

Peterson was the son of a DL&W conductor who got lots of photos of areas normally off-limits to railfans, particularly the Scranton yards. Lots of color photos of DL&W steam, and there's even some 1938 color photos (!!) of the streamliner (I forget the loco #?), the one which was the sole recipient of green and red trim. Purty looking enjun.

scottychaos wrote:thanks!

Matt, sorry, but im not sure who you mean by "old reliable"..
are you referring to the Lackawanna?
if so, we have two conflicting dates for the last DL&W steam run..

Old Reliable was the Erie. The term was bestowed upon it by the Van Swearingen Brothers when they purchased a controlling interest in the mid 1920s.

The term may have been used locally or by a few people, but to the railroad world at large Old Reliable was the L&N. It was painted on their cars, and to many was synonymous with the railroad. Ask 100 people knowledgable in railroading and I bet 95 would pick L&N. I'm not saying Matt is wrong, I believe him, but it was not applied to the Erie as often as to the L&N.

I split off the posts on Erie jokes and moved them to a new topic named, startlingly enough, Erie Jokes. Please use that topic if you have jokes to post.

The last steam run on the Erie was made on the NJ& NY Railroad now the Pascack Valley Line When K1 pacific 2530 left Woodbine yard on March 17, 1954 with a commuter train.