D&H C-628 #700 in Sterzing bluebonnect paint

The late 1970s/early 1980s were not good for the Delaware & Hudson, and by 1980 the railroad was on the verge of collapsing. The PV&T took notice when Guilford started proposing a bargain-basement takeover (less than a million US dollars!), and counteroffered, starting a small bidding war that ran the sale price up to US$20 million before Guilford threw in the towel.

One of the first things that the PV&T did with their new property was to buy the (now unused, but not torn down yet) overhead on Conrail’s Columbia & Port Deposit, purchase a handful of E44’s, and start operating electric freight from Harrisburg to Washington DC (followed soon thereafter by the purchase of the Atglen & Susquehanna Branch, and (after a fairly complex negotiation with Amtrak) trackage rights to Philadelphia over the Main Line and NE Corridor.

The trackage right concessions that the D&H were given in the Conrail merger turned out to be a mixed bag; container freight from Baltimore, Philadelpha, and Newark turned out to be surprisingly profitable, but the transload facilities in Easton, Allentown, and Reading turned out to be worthless (leaving the old Alphabet Route as a very circuitous way to get to the coast.) From almost the day of the Parsons Vale’s takeover the D&H started planning for an alternate, which came together when the Lackawanna Cutoff and the Rahway Valley Railroad were purchased (and with trackage rights on NJ Transit and the newly formed Delaware-Lackawanna, this gave a route to Newark that was 50 miles shorter than the concession route.

The D&H kept the concession trackage rights to Newark until 2002, but the last freight on that track was in 1998; the trackage rights to Philadelphia had been surrendered three years earlier after running trains on the Main Line/Atglen & Susquehanna and NE Corridor had been debugged.

In 1992, the D&H purchased – with strings attached; a condition of the purchase was that Conrail would retain the monopoly on interchange to other Conrail lines between Owego & Niagara Falls – the Southern Tier, plus the Niagara & Lockport subdivisions (but not the industrial district that used to be the Niagara Junction).

The long-term plan for the D&H was to electrify the entire railroad, but this has been a long process. The line to Montréal was the first to go under wire (at 3000vdc, in 1988), followed by Albany to Sunbury (25kvac, in 1998), and then Sunbury to Harrisburg (also 25kvac, in 2002.)

In 2023, following passage of the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act, a government grant/loan was made to start electrifying (and increasing clearances to allow for double-stack under wire) the Southern Tier from Owego to Buffalo, which is expected to finish around the same time as the OSW’s CTRC electrification from Buffalo west, which, when it finished in 2025, resulted in the D&H being completely electrified.

The D&H owns or has part ownership in a variety of other railroads:

Albany Port Railroad
A terminal railway serving the Port of Albany. Jointly owned by the D&H and CSX.
Allegany County Railroad
ex-PS&N route between Ceres, NY & the Southern Tier at Swain
Batavia Air Line
Attica to Batavia, NY, with a branch connecting to the original Genesee & Wyoming in Retsof, NY.
Columbia & Port Deposit
Sunbury NY to Perryville MD. Jointly owned by the D&H and Norfolk Southern.
East Penn & New Jersey
Scranton to Newark (new trackage rights on the Delaware-Lackawanna & NJ Transit, plus the Lackawanna Cutoff & the Rahway Valley) plus a handful of (ex-Lucerne & Susquehanna branches in the Wyoming Valley.
Napierville Junction
The Canadian subsidiary that owns the D&H main from the Canadian border to Montréal, now jointly owned by the D&H and the TdM
Ontario Southwestern
Fort Erie, Ontario (across the river from Buffalo) to Detroit, MI, along trackage that used to be NYC’s old Canada Southern & the Grand Trunk’s Fort Erie line, plus a handful of branch lines in the Golden Crescent. (Jointly owned by the D&H and the LT&L.)
Owego & Harford
Ex-LV trackage running north out of Owego. Purchased in 2020.
Wellsboro & Corning
A shortline running south out of Corning; it was purchased just as the fracking boom started, and now about 80% of its traffic is fracking sand.
Saratoga & North Creek
The D&H’s Adirondack Branch, which was spun off to become a tourist railway.
  • Copyright © 2024 by Jessica L. Parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us) unless otherwise noted
    Mon Feb 06 20:38:35 PST 2023