Tracks in Hillside

When you get off the Parkway North at exit 142 and then you get on 78 east.. you need to take the first exit to cross over 78 to get onto 78 west.

Just after you pass over 78 and just before you get on the entrance ramp for 78 west there is a set of railroad tracks there. Where do these tracks go and what do they connect to? Are they still in service? I've always been meaning to ask about them but I would always forget.

james1787 wrote:When you get off the Parkway North at exit 142 and then you get on 78 east.. you need to take the first exit to cross over 78 to get onto 78 west.

Just after you pass over 78 and just before you get on the entrance ramp for 78 west there is a set of railroad tracks there. Where do these tracks go and what do they connect to? Are they still in service? I've always been meaning to ask about them but I would always forget.

James,

I believe you are referring to the Hillside Industrial which goes into Irvington..... It branches off the Lehigh line near Route 22....That customer that recieves the tank cars along Route 78 is a fairly large food processing plant.....

Sometimes you get lucky and see a train crossing Liberty Avenue in Hillside. Quite a cacophony with the crossing's bells and locomotive horn resonating against the US 22 viaduct overhead...

AIR, there used to be a "doodlebug" pax service on that line a long time ago. Might have been the only passenger rail service that Irvington ever saw...

(Pity that the CNJ's Newark & New York RR didn't get extended to Irvington, on another note; we might still have it in that case.)

That is a former Lehigh Valley Line. the tracks aren't in the best condition and there are very few movements.

This trackage is the former Lehigh Valley RR Irvington Branch. For many years the branch had indirectly served the large Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery in Newark, NJ. The Lehigh Valley, the Conrail, moved covered hopper cars containing the ingredients to brew beer to the Irvington yard. The material was transloaded into trucks. With the closing of the brewery, the main customer on the branch is a company that receives tank cars of corn oil. This customer is located adjacent to the Interstate 78. Other customers on the line received covered hopper cars containing plastic pellets. The branch is normally served by Conrail's OI-10, departing Parkview Yard in Newark in the afternoon for the run up the branch.

I was looking in my Union county road map for the Hillside Branch,
and I also found another branch which comes off the LV just south/west of its crossing of the NEC (Hunter?), a ways north of the HIllside Br.
On the map it goes a mile or so
north into Newark and ended at "18th Ave station".

Is any of this branch left? If not, when did it go?

Thanks, JS

That second branch ended, I believe at Newark Terminal, which is (still) a big green building at the south end of Broad Street in Newark. My understanding is the LV used that as its main LCL freight terminal.

While looking at the map, I also remebered there are two railroad bridges over I-78 east of the parkway. In my cloudy memory, I think one of them was a back-up from the Irvington branch to several shippers on the south side of I-78. It looked like it was fenced off last time I drove under it.

Lackawanna484 wrote:That second branch ended, I believe at Newark Terminal, which is (still) a big green building at the south end of Broad Street in Newark. My understanding is the LV used that as its main LCL freight terminal.

While the building itself I don't believe to be used (if it's the one on Poinier between Frelinghuysen and Broad, it was in sad shape when I passed by a few months ago), the yard IS used for lumber transloading, so there is significant rail activity there. Note that some of the streets in the area at the end of Broad St. (by McCarter Highway) have been reconfigured due to the reconstruction of the McCarter highway a few years back.
This also gives me a chance to once again mention the former Peddie St. branch, which came off that LV line, headed west along the north side of Peddie (at least one large industries along the former ROW still has several curved loading docks once serviced by this branch), and then after passing under the I78 exit ramps, turned North along Badger Ave. - many of the former small industries here have been torn down into barren lots filled with orange/brown rubble

Sir Ray wrote:

Lackawanna484 wrote:That second branch ended, I believe at Newark Terminal, which is (still) a big green building at the south end of Broad Street in Newark. My understanding is the LV used that as its main LCL freight terminal.

While the building itself I don't believe to be used (if it's the one on Poinier between Frelinghuysen and Broad, it was in sad shape when I passed by a few months ago), the yard IS used for lumber transloading, so there is significant rail activity there. Note that some of the streets in the area at the end of Broad St. (by McCarter Highway) have been reconfigured due to the reconstruction of the McCarter highway a few years back.
This also gives me a chance to once again mention the former Peddie St. branch, which came off that LV line, headed west along the north side of Peddie (at least one large industries along the former ROW still has several curved loading docks once serviced by this branch), and then after passing under the I78 exit ramps, turned North along Badger Ave. - many of the former small industries here have been torn down into barren lots filled with orange/brown rubble

Yes.

It's really a shame when you see all the industrial base that's eroded in the south ward of Newark, the south side of Irvington, some of Hillside, and all of those unused spurs.

Peddie Street in particular had several small manufacturers, and offered thousands of jobs and a shot at a better life for so many people.

A history of the Lehigh Valley's Irvington Branch appeared in Volume 5, Number 2 of the New Jersey Midland Historical Society quarterly publication "The Midlander Trainsheet"

http://njmidland.railfan.net/midlande.htm

Sir Ray wrote:

Lackawanna484 wrote:That second branch ended, I believe at Newark Terminal, which is (still) a big green building at the south end of Broad Street in Newark. My understanding is the LV used that as its main LCL freight terminal.

While the building itself I don't believe to be used (if it's the one on Poinier between Frelinghuysen and Broad, it was in sad shape when I passed by a few months ago), the yard IS used for lumber transloading, so there is significant rail activity there. Note that some of the streets in the area at the end of Broad St. (by McCarter Highway) have been reconfigured due to the reconstruction of the McCarter highway a few years back.
This also gives me a chance to once again mention the former Peddie St. branch, which came off that LV line, headed west along the north side of Peddie (at least one large industries along the former ROW still has several curved loading docks once serviced by this branch), and then after passing under the I78 exit ramps, turned North along Badger Ave. - many of the former small industries here have been torn down into barren lots filled with orange/brown rubble

The Peddie st branch was also known for the ice houses, along Badger ave.

I forgot to mention, if anyone is on Frelinghuysen when they are swiching the lumber yard, your in for quite a wait, somtimes up to 15 mins.

I found a Sanborn map and the Peddie St branch is the one
I was thinking of -- after turning off Peddie and going up Badger
as mentioned in an earlier post, and jogging a bit west, it ended at a small
yard at 18th st with a freigth station.

The outline of the old yard is still really obvious on Google maps satellite photos, south of 18th, north of Muhammed ALi, and west of Boyd.
In the map it was labelled PRR, not LV. Does that sound right?

JS

pumpers wrote:I found a Sanborn map and the Peddie St branch is the one
I was thinking of -- after turning off Peddie and going up Badger
as mentioned in an earlier post, and jogging a bit west, it ended at a small
yard at 18th st with a freigth station.
The outline of the old yard is still really obvious on Google maps satellite photos, south of 18th, north of Muhammed ALi, and west of Boyd.
In the map it was labelled PRR, not LV. Does that sound right?

The only reason I originally found out about this branch was my older Hagstrom has the word 'ConRail' oddly floating above Badger Ave., with no track symbols on the map for 10 blocks around. I figured something had to be there originally, and after a field trip to trace the ROW I knew I was right (although I think the ROW to the former freight yard is so obstructed that I didn't recognize the ROW continued and just thought the branch ended there south of Avon).
Sorry, no label on my map for either PRR or LV...

That line was a PRR branch.

See the following:

http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/NEWARK/Newark_1944.jpg