Delaware Water Gap The Old Road

Title

Delaware Water Gap The Old Road

Artist

Gary Keesler

Medium

Photograph - Digital Art Photography

Description

The Old Road passes beneath the Delaware River Viaduct near Slateford, PA.

The Lackawanna Old Road was part of the original mainline of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (DL&W).

Opened in 1856, it was for a half-century simply a part of the line connecting New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In 1911, the DL&W cut 11 miles (18 km) off the route by opening the Lackawanna Cut-Off, which split off from existing track at the new Port Morris Junction and Slateford Junction.

The 39.6-mile (63.7 km) stretch of existing track between these junctions was relegated to secondary status and became known as the "Old Road".

The Old Road involves one railroad tycoon (John I. Blair) and four railroads: the DL&W, the Jersey Central (CNJ), the Morris & Essex Railroad (M&E) and the Warren Railroad. Originally, the Warren Railroad was to tie together the CNJ and the DL&W.

The purpose of building the 19-mile (31 km) Warren Railroad was to connect the CNJ at Hampton, New Jersey and the Lackawanna's mainline at the Delaware River.

The original plan would not have created the Old Road. Expensive to build, the Warren Railroad required a large amount of excavation, three large bridges, and two tunnels.

Construction started in 1853; the line opened to rail traffic three years later.

In 1862, Oxford Tunnel (also known as Van Ness Gap Tunnel) opened, relieving trains of a slow and arduous climb on a temporary track over Van Ness Gap.

Yet the new tunnel did not prevent the subsequent collapse of the DL&W-CNJ merger plan, which shattered the premise for the building of the Warren Railroad.

With the opening of the Cut-Off in 1911, the line became known as the Old Road.

No longer the mainline, it was used primarily as a branch line for local freight shipments.

It still saw the occasional through train when rail traffic was heavy on the Cut-Off, and served as the main line in 1941 when a rockslide closed the Cut-Off for about a month. In 1955, Hurricane Diane's torrential rains caused record flooding along the Delaware River and forced the Lackawanna to reroute trains, such as the Phoebe Snow, over part of the Old Road.

The storm also washed out the Pennsylvania Railroad's Bel-Del Railroad north of Belvidere, New Jersey, leading the railroad to remove the section north to the junction of the Old Road at Manunka Chunk and end PRR service from Trenton, New Jersey, to East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

1925 Rockport Wreck: The Old Road was the site of the DLW's most infamous train wreck.

On June 16, 1925, a passenger train carrying German-American tourists from Chicago to Hoboken was slated to run over the Lackawanna Cut-Off, but in order to avoid freight trains on the line the special train was diverted onto the Old Road to Port Morris.

At Rockport, NJ, the train struck debris washed onto a road crossing by a heavy thunderstorm.

The train derailed, and killed 47 passengers and three trainmen. In 1995, on the 70th anniversary of the wreck, a stone and plaque was erected at the Rockport crossing to remember the lives lost.

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Uploaded

March 30th, 2014

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