D&H buying the O&W to get access to New York City

[Bob Sandusky]

With the Liquidation of the O&W, they could have purchased the assets of the O&W without the debt. Scranton-Cornwall/Weehauken and several other branches would have probably been what the D&H would have taken. That and locomotives. An FT in Lightning stripes would have been pretty sweet!

Not entirely true. Much of the best "assets" owned by the O&W was its locomotive and rolling stock and that is mobile thus if used as collateral on loans the lien holder would have first dibs.

Also when many times the government gets involved in liquidating a corporation you don't get a chance to 'cherry pick' the assets. They agree to sell you certain assets if your willing to take a certain amount of the dogs with it. It is the 'dogs' that make or break the deal, the value of a good asset is often more than offset by a lousy one.

The other issue would be would a route from Scranton to Weehawken have generated enough new traffic to offset the cost of running and maintaining the route

While a very scenic route the O&W failed for a reason. A lousy business model. Even if a good organization like the D&H ran the route the business model is still lousy. Like gravity there are certain things you just can't overcome at a reasonable cost.

[march hare]

Not to mention that the New York City access would have been over somebody else's railroad.

How, exactly, did the O&W connect with the rest of the world in New Jersey? I've never seen a description of how their interchange traffic was handled out of Weehawken. Did they interchange directly, or did they have to hand everything over to the New York Central for forwarding?

[lvrr325]

Even the O&W's mobile assets weren't worth much.

Most of the O&W's FTs were close to obsolete and either were not worth buying out the leases or whatever broker picked them up wanted way too much for them, since they rotted away for about 10 years before the NYC bought them purely to trade in on GP40s.

A lot of the cabooses ended up burned to salvage the metal scrap if I remember right. I don't think any of the other freight or passenger cars were of any use to anyone either; some of them still sit in a scrapyard (or they did 3 or 4 years ago). What wasn't obsolete wood cars was beat to death from years of deferred maintenance.

About the only equipment of value the O&W had were it's switchers and a few of it's newer F-units.

[Engineer Spike]

I'm sure that the D&H would have been most interested in coal branches in the Scranton and Carbondale areas. As to the rest, I have serious doubts. Until the coal traffic dried up, the D&H was a serious money maker. Much of the coal went to the New England market. It was a connection between the PRR in Buttonwood to the B&M and Rutland. Also it was a conduit fro paper and natural resources out of Canada. I don't know how much they cared about the NYC market. It was already saturated. They may have wanted to connect with the New Haven in Campbell Hall, but there were already established connections there.
FTs in blue and Gray? Oldtimers at work say that real D&H engines are black with yellow stripes! Just like real New Haven is Hunter Green and Warm Orange.