Grassroots Railroad Sports?

Possibly the most photographed train wreck ever,  the 1895 Granville to Paris went out the back of the Montparnasse train station.

(colorized version first)

Today I had a jury duty summons for county court in Utica but after being there for 45 minutes, the judge dismissed the entire jury because one of the parties tested positive for Covid. That left me in Utica on a weekday early in the morning with nothing to do. So I decided to catch some action on the NYS&W Utica Branch, that strange amalgamation of track formerly belonging to the West Shore, the NYO&W and the DL&W. I was a bit too late to catch them running up the middle of Schuyler Street but I got a few other photos.

Grabbing some cars at Oneida Warehousing on the old West Shore.

Running past a U-Haul on some rare active ex-NYO&W trackage.

Southbound on the ex-DL&W line that ran from Binghamton to Utica. Sadly, south of Sangerfield has been out of service for many years, with no moves to reactivate it. They performed maintenance to the line this year, repairing some washouts, but the official word was that it was preventative work to keep the line from deteriorating further, not a sign of an impending return to service. Many say that the line could actually be a going concern if the operator wanted to market it more and wish that NYS&W would sell it off to either Finger Lakes Railways or Genesee Valley Transportation.

Passing the old DL&W depot at Chadwicks, NY.

The NYS&W has run test trains on the Utica branch on the 20 miles of track from Sangerfield south to Sherburne a couple times over the past few years. The last revenue train to Sherburne was in November of 2009. The line was then embargoed between these two towns because there was just one customer in Sherburne, a pet food company, and that customer only received one or two carloads a month by that point, and the railroad deemed that insufficient traffic to sustain 20 miles of track. Further back, a flood in 2006 severed the line south of Sherburne to Chenango Forks (where the Binghamton-Syracuse and Binghamton-Utica lines diverge), and that was repaired in 2018 and saw a few moves over it only for it to wash out again in the storm on Halloween of '19. Chenango County's Industrial Development Agency has spearheaded the drive to obtain governmental grants to keep the line south of Sangerfield open and repaired, and work was performed this summer, but as some have said, as long as NYS&W owns it, don't expect much. Its too bad that NYS&W sold off the steam locomotive and got out of running passenger excursions as soon as Walter Rich died, because from Chadwicks south is a very scenic run through the bottom of the Chenango Valley, and running weekend trips wouldn't even interfere with NYS&W UT-1, since that only runs on weekdays.

NYS&W C420 #2002 and another unknown unit running up Schuyler Street with a passenger excursion from Utica to Binghamton. The #2002 was ex-Long Island Rail Road, meaning it had a high short hood, a steam generator, high-speed gearing, no dynamic brakes, and was configured to run Long Hood Forward.

NYS&W #2002 at Chenango Forks on May 18th, 1983.

Taken the same day as the above photo, NYS&W #2002 departing from Binghamton.

Two NYS&W Northern Division trains have combined at Chenango Forks, New York in an odd lashup. A southbound train on the Syracuse line, led by a former Adirondack Railway RS3 still in Adirondack's green scheme, was "outlawed" (crew ran out of time on their shift) at Chenango Forks. Former LIRR C420 #2002 arrived on the Utica line, cut off its train, and pulled the Jamesville train south of the junction of the two lines, then backed onto the Utica cars and headed to Binghamton. After the 1979-1981 Adirondack Railway went out of business, the equipment sat in the NYS&W's yard at Utica and NYS&W ended up parting out the "Tampa Tiger" RSC-2 and putting the two RS-3s in regular service.

NYS&W #3004 at the Sangerfield feed mill that the Suzie-Q still serves. Somehow the NYS&W ended up with 5 of the rare, and much maligned, Alco C430s on their roster in the early '80s.  Two were wrecked in separate accidents and a third was also scrapped, with the surviving two being sold to the Western New York & Pennsylvania during a rationalization of the NYS&W's eclectic roster. The #3004 was one of the C430s to be wrecked, laid on it's side due to ice built up on a grade crossing.

NYSW C430 #3000 at the feed mill in Norwich. NYS&W had a thing for making all of their units even numbers in the late '70s and early '80s, to make their fleet appear larger than it was. For example, they had 5 C430s, but they were numbered #3000, #3002, #3004, #3006, and #3008 to make it look like they had eight units.

NYSW #3004 leaving Norwich. From this angle you can see the weird Alco Hi-Adhesion trucks, which were one of the complaints about the C430. The trucks may have improved adhesion, the ride quality was mercilessly poor.

NYSW #3006 belching a cloud of smoke as it crosses the Chenango River at Chenango Bridge, NY

NYS&W RS-1 #238 at Cooperstown Junction on the Cooperstown & Charlotte Valley Railroad. The reason for NYS&W power on the C&CV was that both railroads, along with several others, were part of Delaware-Otsego Corporation, a holding company formed by Walter Rich in 1965 that included NYS&W, C&CV, the Fonda, Johnstown & Gloversville, the Central New York Railroad, the Lackawaxen & Stourbridge Railroad, the Rahway Valley Railroad, the Staten Island Railroad, and briefly the Toledo, Peoria & Western. Today, most of those lines have been sold off to new owners, with the NYS&W and the Central New York Railroad being the only two still owned by Delaware-Otsego Corporation.

Almost all the later power on the NYS&W were secondhand purchases, but the RS-1s and S-2s were all purchased in the late '40s, sending NYS&W steam, also an eclectic secondhand mix, to an early grave.

C430 #3002 running long hood forward down Schuyler Street in Utica, during one of those pleasant CNY winters.

Ex-Fonda, Johnstown & Gloversville RS-2 performing switching at Sangerfield with C420 #2002. The FJ&G dated back to 1867, and had operated electric interurban cars in addition to steam and diesel power over the years, with an interchange with both the NYC and the D&H (in fact, steam generator-equipped #100 was originally a D&H unit). The Delaware-Otsego Corp. picked up the FJ&G in 1975 and turned it into a pretty profitable operation, but then the '80s recession wiped it out, and the last revenue move was in 1984. The final run was in 1988, when a Trackmobile collected the last remaining equipment to move off the property and the majority of the rails were torn up two years later. The #100 was traded in to GE towards the batch of twenty B40-8s that the NYS&W bought in the late 1980s.

NYS&W RS-3 #101 working on a different Delaware-Otsego Corp. operation, the Lackawaxen & Stourbridge (now known as the Delaware, Lackawaxen & Stourbridge, which I rode this spring). The RS-3 was a boomer unit, having served the D&H, then the D-O Corp-owned Central New York Railroad, then the NYS&W, and then was sold off to Cuyahoga Valley. While the #101 was scrapped in 1999 and the D-O Corp rid themselves of the L&S in 1989, the Bangor & Aroostook-painted EMD BL2 is still there and operating on the now-DL&S

Freshly overhauled at the short-lived Rome Locomotive Works, C430 #3006 leads an Operation Lifesaver special down Schuyler Street in Utica. The only car in the consist is one of those awesome CB&Q round-end observation/dome cars that they had. 

Eastbound Susquehanna stack train NTV-4 is pulled onto the NYS&W Northern Division in Binghamton, New York. In the 1980s, NYS&W ran a land-bridge intermodal double-stack train for Sealand, in conjunction with CSX and the D&H (Chicago-Buffalo over CSX, Buffalo-Binghamton on the D&H over Conrail trackage rights, Binghamton-Little Ferry on the NYS&W) Conrail would not permit Susquehanna crew changes on the Southern Tier main line, so NYS&W trains were required to pull off onto the Northern Division a little ways. After a new crew was onboard, they would back the train onto the Southern Tier and then proceed to their destination. Here a new crew is ready to head to Little Ferry. The operation was stymied by having to travel over Gennessee & Wyoming-owned shortline Buffalo & Pittsburgh having no real ambition to move the train over their rails, and often causing long delays. The irony there was that the B&P had been Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh (B&O) trackage that CSX had owned and sold off to G&W, a case of CSX shooting themselves in the foot. 

In the lead is C430 #3008, which is rare to see in action. The #3008 suffered a wrist pin failure in it's engine fairly early during its tenure with the NYS&W and was moved to Binghamton to await repair or replacement of the prime mover. With the high priority on the Sealand train and the decreasing reliability of the C430s, the NYS&W decided to purchase a bunch of 45-series EMDs from Burlington Northern, and the repairs to #3008 never came, with it eventually scrapped at Binghamton in 1989. The #3004 coupled behind it would also bite the dust in 1989, when ice buildup in a flange at a grade crossing flopped it on it's side.

NYS&W #3000 and #3002 are paired up with a leased ex-ATSF CF7, headed east through Port Jervis on their way to Little Ferry with a Sealand stacker. You can see a Conrail unit to the left in the background.

A mix of motive power arrives in Binghamton, having just come from Buffalo that morning. In the lead is C430 #3002 and behind it is the ex-LIRR C420 now in NYSW yellowjacket livery and wearing the #2010, it's second of three numbers it wore at the NYS&W. Then behind that is another C430, and following that up is a leased CF7.

Eastbound Susquehanna Sea-Land stack train NTV-4 skirts the Delaware River at Coshecton, New York with two C430s and a leased CF7. This was the Conrail Southern Tier Line, formerly the Erie-Lackawanna line through New Jersey and New York. Conrail preferred to route traffic over the faster and more direct NYC/Penn Central line, leaving NYS&W and D&H free to run over the more scenic and winding Southern Tier Line. When Conrail was split up in 1999, Norfolk Southern got the Southern Tier Line and today it's largely a ghost town.

The same day, the same train hugs the Delaware River at Basket, New York

Five Alcos cough smoke as they hit their train hard at Deposit, NY. Present are four of the Susie-Q's C430s, and a quarter of total C430 production, and the ex-LIRR C420. The NYS&W did own a second C420, a low-nose ex-L&N unit that was NYS&W #2000, but it suffered a prime mover failure in 1983 and was scrapped. Seems funny that NYS&W didn't cannibalize the #2002/2010/260 to keep the #2000 running, since the #2000 had a low nose, was set up for short hood forward operation and had dynamic brakes. The engineer is trying to build up momentum quick, because the Gulf Summit Grade is not that far away, which was a helper district on the Erie back in the day.

The stacks are clearer now, as those five Alcos from the aboce photo are wheeling their train through Basket, NY

In June 1988, the Susquehanna took delivery of four new GE B40-8’s, the first brand-new diesels purchased by the Susie-Q since a batch of GP18s in 1962 intended to bump their increasingly trouble-prone C430’s off of their stack trains. The stack trains were highly profitable and NYS&W wanted to have them arriving on time and stay in the good graces of SeaLand. On the 20th of that same month, Guilford Transportation Industries jettisoned the Delaware & Hudson, declaring it bankrupt and the NYS&W was chosen as the designated operator of the D&H until a new owner could be found.  Suddenly the new GE’s, intended for service between Little Ferry and Binghamton were now going to roam as far as Buffalo, Washington, and Rouses Point, Vermont, and this unexpected development, combined with Guilford holding onto all of the power that they owned, left the Susie-Q even more power short. A variety of SD45s, SDP45s and F45s were leased and purchased from BN, and twenty more shiny B40-8’s, financed by CSX, were delivered the following April. Here, four-month-old #4008 leads a northbound D&H train past the site of SW Cabin in Nineveh, New York, where the D&H Penn Division, abandoned in 1985, and the Belden Hill Line diverged.

One of the two F45s that the NYS&W ended up with rolling through Allentown with borrowed CSX power, one in Yellow Nose 1 livery, and one still in the Chessie Systems colors. The F45s quickly became railfan favorites, since the F45s had all gone to western lines and were a fresh site in the north east.