by Suburbanite
Unfortunately, my antique timetable collection is in storage at the moment. Does anyone have Lackawanna timetables (I guess it was always Form 10A) from the 1950s (or 40s) with:
(a) frequency, times, and duration of commutes along the old Boonton Line from, say Denville, Mountain Lakes, and/or Boonton to Hoboken;
(b) the duration of trips from Dover, Denville, Morris Plains, and/or Morristown to Hoboken, and whether they used to skip more stops east of Summit than they do today;
(c) what the service was like on the Sussex Branch in the '40s vs. the 50s, and
(d) the $64,000 question: when did the service get as lousy as it became by the 1980s? Was it still under the E-L, was it Conrail running things for the New Jersey Department of Transport, or was it under NJT itself?
I know that on the short Montclair Branch service was very much more frequent as late as 1960, and that by 1980, it was down to five trains in the morning, no more than seven in the afternoon/evening, no mid-day or night service, and no weekend service. Naturally, with so few trains, there weren't many riders, either.
(BTW, was there any difference in carded times when service shifted from steam to diesel? I don't have an exact date for the Boonton Line (probably somewhere between 1952 and 1955), but I know that the MU electrics started running on the Montclair Branch in 1930, and on the rest of the M&E in 1931, so the comparisons there should be easy to make.)
(a) frequency, times, and duration of commutes along the old Boonton Line from, say Denville, Mountain Lakes, and/or Boonton to Hoboken;
(b) the duration of trips from Dover, Denville, Morris Plains, and/or Morristown to Hoboken, and whether they used to skip more stops east of Summit than they do today;
(c) what the service was like on the Sussex Branch in the '40s vs. the 50s, and
(d) the $64,000 question: when did the service get as lousy as it became by the 1980s? Was it still under the E-L, was it Conrail running things for the New Jersey Department of Transport, or was it under NJT itself?
I know that on the short Montclair Branch service was very much more frequent as late as 1960, and that by 1980, it was down to five trains in the morning, no more than seven in the afternoon/evening, no mid-day or night service, and no weekend service. Naturally, with so few trains, there weren't many riders, either.
(BTW, was there any difference in carded times when service shifted from steam to diesel? I don't have an exact date for the Boonton Line (probably somewhere between 1952 and 1955), but I know that the MU electrics started running on the Montclair Branch in 1930, and on the rest of the M&E in 1931, so the comparisons there should be easy to make.)