Recent reads

The New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad, by Robert E. Mohowski. The NYS&W is one of those railroads whose mythic stature among railfans far outweighs its economic importance. This is no doubt partially because its main line ran near the editorial headquarters of Railroad Model Craftsman and Railroad & Railfan magazines, prompting an unusual number of articles about the “Susie-Q” or “Suskie-Hannah” in those publications. But it does deserve much of the attention it receives. Its role in the Great Game between railroad empires vying for control of traffic entering and leaving New York City via northern New Jersey was as complex and tension-provoking as any high-stakes poker game, and its latter day visibility as a commuter route kept it in the forefront of public attention in its local area. It also passed through some extraordinarily striking scenery, especially on its western end, and made use of some unusual motive power including a dizzying variety of rail motor cars, ranging from early Brills with mechanical transmissions to EMC gas-electrics to streamlined ACF Motorailers to stainless-steel Budd Rail Diesel Cars, some of which remain in operation today on commuter railways such as the Trinity Rail Express in Texas.

Mohowski’s book concentrates on two periods of the railroad’s tumultuous history. The first few chapters detail its early business history, in which it was a pawn in the Great Game between established routes, like the Erie and the Lackawanna, and rambunctious latecomers like the New York, Oswego & Midland. The NYS&W’s predecessor, the New Jersey Midland, was cobbled together from railroads intended to serve purely local purposes, but it possessed one great advantage: a route connecting the ferries on the west side of the Hudson River, across from New York City, with the countryside to the west, and to the larger railroads which carried traffic from points further west. The NYO&M captured the NJM in order to use it as the final link in its bid to capture traffic between the Great Lakes and New York City. When the NYO&M’s high-stakes gamble collapsed in bankruptcy, the Susquehanna diverted its corporate attention westward, toward the lucrative anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Here, once again, it found itself an undercapitalized newcomer, attempting to use less-desirable routes over rough topography to siphon traffic away from established railroads, but its aggressive rate cutting won support from independent mine operators. In 1897 J.P. Morgan engineered a takeover by its competitor the Erie Railroad, which for the next forty years operated it as a secondary branchline and thereby eliminated its rate-cutting competition.

This era in the railroads’ history ended with bankruptcy and retrenchment in the late 1930s. The Pennsylvania extensions were abandoned, along with the declining market in anthracite, but the road was freed from Erie control. Mohowski’s coverage of the subsequent decades in the road’s history concentrates on its commuter operations, with particular attention to the variety of unorthodox self-propelled passenger equipment which it used for this service.

My only complaint: I would have liked to see more detailed coverage of the railroad’s freight operations, including employee timetables and description of day-to-day operating practices, and more photographs and specifications of the road’s equipment and facilities.