Try here:
http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=46523
The Piermont Branch gets a lot of queries about every six months... sometimes the questions just start on the NJ side of the border.
I vaguely remember the rails still being in place crossing Middletown Road near the Red Rail in the early '70's, but I don't believe a train ran east to Sparkill or Piermont since that late sixties...
Thanks for the link; I didn't find what I was looking for in that post, but now that I know I should be searching for "Piermont" rather than Nanuet, I'm sure more searching will uncover the answer!
The Red Rail... haven't thought of that place in years! Good times...
Hey! I wonder if the bar - The Red RAIL - was named for the train tracks? That never occurred to me before!
Any useful information here?
http://raildata.railfan.net/erie/homeerr.html
Actually, I had found that page before, but it did not have what I was looking for. Thanks for the link, though!
Here's a 1945 map of the area showing your street (called Ehrhardt Rd at that time) and the Piermont branch.
Awesome! That confirms for me that it is indeed the Piermont branch that I've been thinking about, and it shows the junction on the west side of Middletown Rd to what is now the active line. So I was wrong in speculating that it ended somewhere in NJ.
And, it shows the dirt road to my parents' neighborhood (now paved)!! (and it shows that the current site of the Nanuet Mall was a swamp back then).
Actually, it's still called Ehrhardt Rd (south of Townline). It's called Blauvelt Rd north of Townline Rd -- and I think it was Blauvelt Rd back then too.
That's a great link - I love maps - I can't believe I never stumbled across this map site before. I see from an adjacent quadrangle that the tracks I played on as a child, which I now know went to Piermont (not NJ), are the same ones that crossed a one-lane tunnel on Sickletown Rd. Driving through that tunnel always seemed like such a death-defying act when I was a kid! Whichever sibling sat in the front got to lay on the horn (big thrill!) as we drove through that tunnel. I'll bet the tunnel is gone now - without the tracks, it would make no sense to have a dangerous road like that, these days.
I live in Poughkeepsie now, of course we have Metro-North running alongside the Hudson, but there were other trains running through here as recently as the 80's. I used to drive past the train that went through Hopewell/Fishkill after picking up the kids from daycare. They loved to see the choo-choo! Now that I have links to more sites, I can figure out which train that was.
I tried to get the book mentioned a few posts back, but Amazon sez that it's no longer available. Darn.