The Tri-State Railway
Autumn in the Northeastern United States

Introduction

It's Autumn in the late 1960s and the prospect of a blustery winter is the least of the concerns for the management of the Tri-State Railway. For nearly a century, the railroad and its predecessor lines have bucked the odds and dismissed the naysayers while they eked out a living from several hundred miles of track in the New York / Pennsylvania / New Jersey tristate region. But now, surrounded by more prosperous railroads, and with the mammoth Penn Central merger in the offing, making the ends meet is becoming a formidable challenge for the scrappy little railway, and the keys to their success - or failure - are almost entirely outside of their control.

The Concept

The concept for the TSRY (and the LO&HR elsewhere on this website) is both simple and highly complex. It's simple in that I have strung together a number of railroads, shortlines, and third-party routes, many of which are now long-abandoned, and turned them into a regional railroad that, at face value, is similar to several other such railroads that served the region in question. And it's complex in that I set a goal for myself of providing, at the least, a remotely plausible reason for why these lines weren't abandoned or why they ended up merged together in the fashion that they have. Is this a perfect tale? No. So please consider it a work in progress.

At this writing (14-Oct-2022), the Tri-State Railway was formed in the early 1960s by merging a handful of commonly owned but mostly independently operated railroads serving upstate New York, northern New Jersey, and north-eastern Pennsylvania. These properties included the shortlines: Middletown & New Jersey, Delaware & Northern, the Unadilla Valley, and the Kanona & Prattsburgh. The major components were the Elmira, Cortland & Northern, the Lehigh & New England, the New York, Susquehanna & Western, and the Oswego & Weehawken - the latter being a 1957 post-bankruptcy reorganization of the New York, Ontario & Western. In addition to these lines' historic routes, the O&W owned the DL&W's Binghamton - Buffalo route - a concession sale that was a condition of the Erie Lackawanna merger - and trackage rights over the D&H between Binghamton and Sidney, NY.

Let's look a little deeper into the railroad's concept. As I've said, the Tri-State Railway is a proto-freelanced model railroad concept born of the not-so-simple question of how to keep the New York, Ontario & Western Railway operating after its March, 1957, abandonment date. If we assume that any 'realistic' options at the time would not have worked, then I wanted that something to at least be plausible given how other rail lines in the region have managed to hang on over the past few decades. Presently, the plan is to model the TSRY as it would have been in the late 1960s - post-Erie Lackawanna merger, but pre-Penn Central.

The TSRY was formed by the merger of the eight railroad properties owned by the Cahill family of Elmira, NY, in the wake of the Erie Lackawanna merger. Since 1884 the family has been involved in railroading in New York State. Initially, this involvement was as an off-shoot of their mercantile interests. In 1884 they purchased the Cazenovia, Canastota & DeRuyter Railway and the Utica, Ithaca & Elmira Railway, and merged them to form the Elmira, Cortland & Northern Railroad. This was followed in 1911 by the Delaware & Northern Railway, in 1915 by the Kanona & Prattsburgh Railway, and by the Unadilla Valley Railway in 1936. Two decades later, in 1957, the family took a huge gamble by acquiring the well-and-truly bankrupt New York, Ontario & Western Railway. As part of the corporate reorganization, them renamed it the Oswego & Weehawken Railroad in a nod to its historical "O&W" nickname.

Despite the change in ownership, the new O&W continued to test everyone's faith in the possibility of the railroad ever turning a profit. Whether by plan or pure luck, the possibility for a return to profitability arose for the O&W out of the Erie - Delaware, Lackawanna & Western merger. As a condition of the merger, the ICC ordered Erie-Lackawanna to sell the Lackawanna's Binghamton - Buffalo mainline to the O&W - the primary reason being to preserve the O&W's share of the Buffalo - Maybrook traffic. To access their new route, trackage rights were gained over the Delaware & Hudson between Sidney and Binghamton. These rights were later cemented when the O&W made a deal for shared ownership of that portion of the D&H.

In 1959, in an effort to expand their traffic base, the Cahills had added the Lehigh & New England Railroad to their little family of railroads. And now, with a healthy amount of freight, and some passenger traffic, between Buffalo and New York City, management again turned its attention toward New Jersey. In March of 1961 they acquired the Middletown & New Jersey Railway, and the following month they bought the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railway. They now possessed a friendly connection between the O&W mainline at Middletown, NY, and waterfront of New York Harbor. The only problem, per se, was that neither the M&NJ nor the Susquehanna's Hanford branch were ideally suited to hot manifest freights. Reconstruction was called for!

In addition to upgrading track and bridges, the Cahills decided that it was also time to update the image of their railroads. In a relatively painless process, they requested and received permission to consolidate their eight properties into a single railroad. Effective July 1, 1963, they were merged to form the Tri-State Railway.

Lastly, it should once again be noted that all aspects of the design of the TSRY are a work in progress, and the information above is subject to revision and total alteration at the whim of its author. And as this is a work in progress...

TO BE CONTINUED!

Rosters

UPDATE 14-Oct-2022: coming soon....