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It was a railroad that ran from Cornwall-on-Hudson to Oswego. It didn't go to Ontario, much less "Western". It was abandoned in 1957 after struggling for years. Some of Highway 17 was built on the r-o-w. Not many remnants left.
In the late 1940's, Dad brought me to Weehawken, where we boarded an O&W train pulled by one of their cab units. I recall looking out the back door when we left the West Shore trackage at Cornwall and moved onto the O&W. We got off at Middletown, N.Y., and returned home on the Erie to Jersey City. The Wikipedia article you link to has some excellent links at the bottom, as there are stalwart historians interested in the O&W.
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As a kid, I puzzled why Volkswagen adopted the O&W logo.
No abandoned railroad conjures up more a greater mystique among the Fraternity of the Iron horse than the "Old Woman".
The years between the end of the Civil War and the Panic of 1873 were the high-water-mark of what came to be called "railroad fever" -- when a promoter with a dream could raise enough capital in an aspiring community to put down rails in the hope that progress would follow. DeWitt C. Littlejohn was such a man, who persuaded the citizens of the aspiring Lake Ontario port city of Oswego to build a line southward, with New York as the ultimate goal.
Unfortunately, Mr. Littlejohn pursued a strategy of bypassing established commercial centers in favor of smaller places still willing to put up some immediate cash; it forsook Binghamton in favor of Norwich and Syracuse for Oneida. It did have the only line through the heart of the Catskills, parallel to the present day New York State Highway 17, and got to tidewater at Weehawken, NJ via a trackage rights agreement with the New York, West Shore and Buffalo (later New York Central) from Cornwall southward, Company headquarters was later established at Middletown, and its distinctive general office building was to survive it by nearly fifty years before a fire in 2004.
The line eventually stabilized and settled into a modest solvency. It built a branch to the anthracite fields at Carbondale and Scranton, PA, solicited interchange freight as a partner to several eastern trunk lines, and benefitted considerably in pre-Automotive Age days from summer tourism to the "borscht belt" of the Catskills.
But by the mid-1930s, "the writing was on the wall"; the line filed for bankruptcy in 1937. but continued to generate enough revenue to continue operation -- even replacing its steam locomotives like the rest of the industry. But funds ran out in the spring of 1957, and the "O&W" became the largest railroad, in terms of mileage, to cease operating until the collapse of the Rock Island in the early 1980's.
Despite its passing, the line's popularity among railroad buffs can probably be linked to the same rationale that drives students of Civil War history; the past may be gone, and finite, but a new tidbit or two every now and then revives the interest in "chasing the Old Woman's skirts".
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 11-19-2015 at 02:53 AM..
It was a railroad that ran from Cornwall-on-Hudson to Oswego. It didn't go to Ontario, much less "Western". It was abandoned in 1957 after struggling for years. Some of Highway 17 was built on the r-o-w. Not many remnants left.
One of its stations was in mountaindale ny where there is a small building with pictures of the old railroad bed and signature locomotives. There was a large wooden trestle which ran about a mile behind my families home, also the tallest waterfall in Sullivan county
There was also a branch running up the 209 corridor to Kingston. A portion of that is now the Hurley Rail Trail.
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