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Delaware and Hudson Railway

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Delaware and Hudson Railway

Reporting marks	DH
Locale	New England
Years of operation	1829 – 1991
Track gauge	4 ft 8½ in (1435 mm)
Headquarters

The Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H) (AAR reporting mark DH) was a Class I railroad which operated in the northeastern United States. It connected New York City with Montreal, Quebec.

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Delaware & Hudson Canal

The Delaware & Hudson was once the oldest transportation company in continuous operation in the United States, having operated since 1823, when it was incorporated by William and Maurice Wurtz as the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company to haul anthracite coal from Honesdale, PA in the Delaware River watershed to the Hudson River at Kingston, NY. To cross the Delaware River, the D&H Canal built the Roebling Aqueduct.

To get the anthracite from the mining site in the Moosic Mountains near Carbondale, PA to the canal at Honesdale, the D&H built a gravity railroad, with construction beginning in 1826.

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Delware & Hudson Railway

From inauspicious beginnings, the Delaware and Hudson Railway was created through various corporate acquisitions by the D&H Canal Co., including:

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the D&H was owned by Dereco, a holding company for Norfolk and Western Railroad, which also owned Erie Lackawanna Railroad. Following the bankruptcy of numerous northeastern U.S. railroads in the 1970s, N&W abandoned Dereco and EL was placed in the federal government's nascent Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), while D&H was again an independent railroad. The creation of Conrail also saw D&H receive trackage conveyences and trackage rights over large parts of the Conrail system, which allowed D&H to operate as far south as Philadelphia, PA and Washington, DC, using former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and Lehigh Valley Railroad trackage.

In 1984, Guilford Rail System purchased the D&H as part of a plan to operate a larger regional railroad from Maine and New Brunswick in the east, to New York and the midwest in the west, Montreal in the north, and the Philadelphia/Washington DC area in the south. The plan did not come to fruition and Guilford declared the D&H bankrupt in 1988, abandoning its operation.

With the D&H in limbo, the federal government appointed the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railroad to operate the D&H under subsidy until such time as a buyer could be found. In 1991, the Canadian Pacific Railway purchased the D&H to give the transcontinental system a connection between Montreal and the New York City metropolitan area.

Under CPR, the D&H trackage was upgraded signficantly, although for a time, the D&H was again in limbo as CPR placed it and other money-losing trackage in the eastern U.S. and Canada into a separate operating company named St. Lawrence and Hudson Railway between 1996 and 2000. SL&H was merged back into CPR in recent years and the D&H connection to New York City is starting to prove its worth.

Nicknamed 'The Bridge Line to New England', or just 'The Bridge Line', the D&H has several unique spots in North American railroading history:

On August 8, 1829, the D&H's first locomotive, the Stourbridge Lion made history as the first locomotive to run on rails in the United States.
A loyal customer of American Locomotive Company, as D&H served Alco's Schenectedy, NY headquarters. D&H took part in the development of roller bearing side-rods and high pressure water tube boilers. It was also one of the early railroads to adopt 4-8-4 Northern locomotives for passenger trains, and 4-6-6-4 Challenger locomotives for freight trains.
During the diesel era, the D&H became famous for its operation of 4 ex-Santa Fe PA locomotives for its passenger trains. These were painted in the classic D&H blue and grey/silver with a yellow stripe.