Steamtown Steam Over Scranton: The Locomotives of Steamtown Special History Study

Just as the steam locomotive had been developed, in a sense, as an alternative to animal power--horses and mules that pulled single cars on little tramway tracks--on railroads, the electric locomotives were developed as an alternative to the steam locomotive. Smoke-spewing, cinder-spitting steam locomotives did not work well in certain places, such as long tunnels where the accumulation of smoke and fumes could and did asphyxiate engine crews. Coal-burning, soot-spreading steam locomotives became unwelcome when their large numbers in and around a major terminal in a large city such as New York or Chicago so fouled the air that air pollution had become a major public issue by the 1890s. Then, too, in cities like New York and Chicago where downtown real estate values climbed out of sight, city governments and the railroads themselves wanted to place tracks underground in tunnels to free valuable real estate overhead, but steam engines could not work in such tunnels because of the exhaust gases and smoke. Thus though steam remained dominant overall on most American railroads for another half century or more, a place still existed for some alternative form of motive power that did not create noxious fumes, did not need combustion (either external or internal) and could do the same job as steam locomotives.

But the electric railroad locomotive had complex origins long before the need for something of that kind became pressing. In 1835, Thomas Davenport of Vermont built a small model of an electric locomotive that ran around a circular track. In 1847, Professor Moses Farmer built a battery locomotive big enough to carry two people. In 1851, Dr. Charles Page operated a battery locomotive over 5 miles of track between Washington, D.C., and Bladensburg, Maryland.

As one might expect, that inventor extraordinaire Thomas Alva Edison began developing a generator-powered electric locomotive at his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, during the 1880s, operating an engine with a belt drive pulling two cars at 40 miles per hour over 1,400 feet of track he had built. Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific became interested and ordered Edison to build two electric locomotives for use at Chicago terminals, but in 1883 bankruptcy forced the Northern Pacific to abandon the development.

In New England at about the same time, Stephen Field built a center cab electric locomotive, or what was to become known as a "steeple cab," which he demonstrated on a small railway in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Edison and Field then formed a partnership in the Electric Railway Company, which demonstrated its first locomotive at the Chicago Railway Exhibition, where it hauled 26,000 people around a circular track.

Also during that productive decade of the 1880s, Frank Sprague invented the axle-hung electric traction motor. In 1889, the Electric Railway Company joined the Edison General Electric Company which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, formerly of the Northern Pacific, acquired Sprague's company and its patents.

After swallowing in 1892 another pioneering electric railway firm, the Thomas-Houston Company, in 1893 the Edison firm became the General Electric Company and produced its first electric locomotive, a 30-ton unit capable of 12,000 pounds of tractive effort and speeds of 30 miles per hour. Operated from a 500-volt direct-current overhead trolley wire, the engine appeared just in time to be shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Meanwhile, a competitor to the General Electric Company in electric railroad technology appeared when in 1895 the company of George Westinghouse joined with the Baldwin Locomotive Works to build a 46-ton two-truck electric locomotive designed, unlike the General Electric locomotives, to use alternating current. Subsequently, although a number of railroads chose direct current systems built by the General Electric Company in conjunction with the American Locomotive Company, many others chose to use systems that employed alternating current and equipment built by the Westinghouse Electric Company in partnership with the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and both types of system remained in service virtually until diesel locomotives eclipsed electric locomotives on the nation's railroads. Each of the two systems of current had its advantages and disadvantages.

The first problem electrification of a main line railroad tackled involved a new 3.7-mile tunnel to carry the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad under part of Baltimore and its harbor. Steam locomotives arriving with trains at either end of the tunnel would shut down and bank their fires while one of three 600-volt direct current, 96-ton, steeple-cab, 360-horsepower locomotives coupled on, pulled the train through the tunnel, and cut off at the far end, where the engine crew would stoke up their steam locomotive and resume travel to their destination Entering this service in 1895, the three pioneer locomotives worked until 1910. Electrification of a small main line portion of the Baltimore and Ohio had proved successful.

Grand Central Terminal in New York City with its 700 trains daily, each with at least one and some with two steam locomotives, not to mention the presence of additional steam switch engines, fouled the air of Manhattan with tons of coal smoke and soot. Aware of the B & O's success with its Baltimore tunnel, the New York legislature in 1903 passed a law that would outlaw steam locomotives south of the Hariem River after 1908. Now the railroads had to electrify Grand Central Station. The New York Central Railroad consequently decided to purchase 95-ton, 425-horsepower 660-volt direct current locomotives built by the American Locomotive Company and General Electric. Also serving Grand Central Terminal, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad meanwhile selected an alternating current system for its approaches to New York City, though its Westinghouse-Baldwin locomotives came equipped to operate from the 660-volt direct current third rail of the New York Central when within the Grand Central Terminal District. The 102-ton New Haven locomotives featured a "box cab" design with two trucks and two pantographs each, a diamond-shaped spring- loaded framework designed to reach above the cab roof and maintain contact with an overhead power wire generally called a catenary. The first New Haven locomotives entered service in 1905, and the New Haven electrified not only its terminal operations, but some of its main line.

Elsewhere in the nation, electric motive power found a place hauling freight as well as passengers. In Montana, the copper-hauling Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway, a subsidiary of the Anaconda Copper Company, electrified its main lines with 2,400-volt catenary electrification during the 1920s, a system that proved successful for the next 40 years. In 1915, the Norfolk & Western used a Westinghouse-Baldwin alternating current system to electrify its lengthy main line Elkhorn Tunnel in West Virginia, which featured 2 percent grades. In 1925, the Virginian Railway electrified its main lines with a similar system.

The history of electrification of main line portions of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which began as early as 1903, merits a book-length study of its own. Resulting in a series of famous electric locomotives, Pennsylvania electrification culminated in 1934 with the creation of the most famous electric locomotive in America, the GG-1, dressed up with Raymond Loewy's striking, streamlined welded body design. Locomotives of the GO-1 type outlived the railroad itself, continuing to operate after the disappearance of the Pennsylvania Railroad into the Penn Central Transportation Company, which passed via bankruptcy into the hands of the Consolidated Rail Corporation.

Far to the west, the Great Northern electrified its line over the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest beginning in 1909, as did the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific in the same region, operating a famous class of distinctively designed "bipolar" electric locomotives not only on freight trains but on express passenger "name" trains such as the Olympian.

Another form of electrification involved the suburban or commuter service on steam railroads in the vicinity of major cities. Using equipment heavier than even that of most electric interurban railways, electric commuter equipment in main line railroad suburban service consisted generally of multiple units of electrically powered steel passenger cars, though some wood cars also entered such service. The standard gauge lines of the North Shore Railroad in Marin County north of San Francisco were electrified beginning in 1903; the North Shore soon would be reorganized and renamed the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. But the first really major principally commuter railroad to convert to electric motive power was the Long Island Railroad, which did so in 1905, purchasing 134 steel multiple-unit electric passenger cars.

The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad was the last major railroad to electrify its commuter operations when it did so in 1930 and 1931, although the Reading had done the same to certain of its lines only months earlier. The Lackawanna electric commuter operations would function essentially unchanged and with the same equipment for a half century of successful and largely trouble-free service. The Lackawanna also had two tri-power locomotives it used on freight transfer runs between the Secaucus freight terminal and the Jersey City Yard; these had batteries, could operate off catenary when on electrified lines, and also had diesel engines that could charge the batteries.

Second in fame only to the GG- 1 of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a series of 20 electric locomotives built to a 1946 order from the government of the Soviet Union was embargoed before delivery when the Cold War developed during the late 1940s, with the result that three-quarters of them ended up on American railroads while the remainder went to Latin America. Twelve of these modern, streamlined, heavy-duty electric locomotives went to the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railway--the "Milwaukee Road"--for service on its 438 miles of electrified line between Harlowton, Montana, and Avery, Idaho, over the Continental Divide--a line that had gone into service with earlier generations of electric locomotives in 1915. Supposedly because of their aborted Soviet destination, this type of locomotive came to be known as the "Little Joe," theoretically for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, though local sources for that nickname existed and no one seems to know the truth of its origin. In addition to the 12 Milwaukee Road Little Joes, three went to the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad, where they attracted equal attention. Whoever their namesake, these struck most observers as handsome locomotives.

Electric locomotives could gather their power in two principal ways: from overhead power wires, either simple trolley wires or more complex catenary wires, using generally diamond-shaped spring-loaded frameworks known as pantographs equipped either with a bar that slid along the wires or a metal tube that rolled along the wires, or in some instances a simple trolley pole with a pulley-type connection; or from an electrified "third rail" located in the center of the track or alongside. A danger of the latter was that it would electrocute any animal or person that touched it; yet third rail remains in use in the 1990s on many electric interurban lines, generally requiring fenced right-of-way or some other form of separation from the potential for encounter with humans or animals.

While new electric lines such as the coal-hauling Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad in Arizona were being built long after World War II, the diesel-electric locomotive gradually eclipsed the electric locomotive on the nation's railroads, ironically at a time when light rail electric street railways and electric interurban lines experienced a resurgence. Cities that had retained them re-equipped them with modern new cars, and cities that had dismantled and scrapped them years before built entirely new street railways and interurban lines.

With respect to main line common carrier railroads, however, the story of their development in the 20th century involves steam, electric, and diesel motive power, but it should be noted that even diesel motive power has been almost universally of the diesel-electric persuasion, the diesel engine being used to drive generators that power axle-hung traction motors, thus substituting for the remote powerhouse that used coal-fired or hydroelectric generation to channel electricity into overhead wires or third rails. Only small diesel locomotives used as yard or industrial switchers made much use of chain, gear, or other mechanical drives, and the only diesel-hydraulic locomotives used in the United States were for experimental purposes, and were deemed unsatisfactory when used under American railroad conditions. Thus the diesel-electric form of locomotive--in a sense, the electric locomotive married to the diesel engine--became dominant to provide the locomotive power of American railroads at the end of the 20th Century.

Baker, P.H., et al. "One Hundred Years of Progress in Railway Mechanical Engineering--Electrical Locomotive Development," Chapter 5 in Railway Mechanical Engineering, A Century of Progress, Car and Locomotive Design. New York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Rail Transportation Division, 1979: 137-160.

Burgess, George H. and Miles C. Kennedy. Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846-1946. Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Railroad, 1949: 463-471, 612-621, 645-650, 744-747.

Middleton, William D. When the Steam Railroads Electrified. Milwaukee: Kalnbach Books, 1974. [This well-illustrated book remains the principal popular account of main-line electrification in North America.]

Rung, Al. "He Styles the Streamliners." Trains, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec. 1948): 16-21.

Steinheimer, Richard. The Electric Way Across the Mountains: Stories of the Milwaukee Road Electrification. Tiburon, Calif.: Carbarn Press, 1980.

Owner(s):

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad 2505
Erie-Lackawanna Railroad 3505
Consolidated Rail Corporation 3505
New Jersey Transit Authority 3505

Car Name(s): None

A.A.R. Class: EP

Series: 2500-2640

Type of Car: Electric Passenger Car (MU)

Seating Capacity: 84

Builder: Pullman Car and Manufacturing Co.
Date Built: 1930

Number in class: 141

Number of Wheels per Truck: 4

Length—Inside: 58 feet 10 inches
Length—Over Buffer: 70 feet 2 inches
Length of Compartment—Baggage or Express: Not applicable

Mail: Not applicable

Remarks: Equipped with a pair of roof pantographs which, when raised, drew electric power from overhead wires, this electric car pulled one or more electric trailer coaches in "MU" or "multiple-unit" trains under the operation of a motorman.

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Passenger Multiple-Unit Motor No. 2505

History: It may be considered more appropriate to treat Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad electric passenger motor car No. 2505 as a variety of passenger coach rather than as an example of motive power, however, it did serve both roles: It constituted the motive power and control cab not only for itself but for a passenger coach coupled behind it, and could serve as the control unit for up to five additional pairs coupled into a string of 12 cars. For the purpose of this report, therefore, No. 2505 will be treated as motive power.

By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, Scranton's home-grown railroad, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, reached from the Hudson River at Hoboken, New Jersey (with its own terminals and ferryboats to serve New York City) westward through Scranton and across Pennsylvania through. Binghamton, New York, and on to Buffalo on Lake Erie, thus connecting the two ends of New York Stale that wrap around northeastern Pennsylvania. The railroad featured branch lines to Ithaca, Syracuse, Oswego, Cincinnatus, Utica, and Richfield Springs in western New York north of Pennsylvania, and to Montrose, Northumberland, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, as well as a maze of short branches and interconnecting lines between Delaware Water Cap and Hoboken on the Hudson River.

Incorporated by special act of the Pennsylvania legislature as the Ligetts Gap Railroad, the Lackawanna actually received its real charter on March 18, 1849, and changed its name on April 14, 1851, to Lackawanna & Western. The Delaware & Cobbs Gap Railroad, chartered December 4, 1850, consolidated with the Lackawanna & Western on April 30, 1853, to form the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. It was three-quarters of a century later to the very month that management of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad decided to electrify part of its system, or to be more precise, to string overhead electric catenary wire and purchase electric motive power.

Still managed by the able William H. Truesdale as it reached its 75th anniversary, the railroad operated 241.37 miles of track in New Jersey, 263.63 miles in Pennsylvania, and 493.42 miles in New York, for a total system of 998.42 miles of line. Much of this was double, triple, or even quadruple track, and the railroad still carried heavy traffic in anthracite coal, as its nickname, "The Road of Anthracite," claimed. But anthracite accounted for a lower percentage of the freight traffic than it once had, the Lackawanna instead carrying heavy tonnage in clay, sand, gravel, stone, bituminous coal, and cement, as well as other mixed freight.

In terms of passenger traffic, while the Lackawanna did operate the usual main and branch line service, its principal business lay in carrying commuters between New York City and their homes in suburban communities to the west in northern New Jersey. Unfortunately, most of this traffic constituted a shorter haul than enjoyed by the commuter runs of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central Railroad and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which also shared in New York City suburban traffic; consequently the Lackawanna's share of the commuter pie proved less profitable.

The automobile had been making serious inroads into railroad passenger traffic for a decade, but the decline in commuter traffic from that cause became precipitous in the railroad's 75th year, when in 1928 alone diversion of passengers to automobiles and bus lines caused a drop of 1,016,000 Lackawanna commuters. Completion of the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River for use by motor vehicles added to this loss, and struck not only the rail commuter traffic but the Lackawanna ferries across the Hudson.

For some years the Lackawanna management had been considering what role electrification of motive power might play in its future. The Pennsylvania Railroad had been using it for some time on certain lines. Use of steam motive power to handle commuter traffic had reached a virtual saturation point involving increasing congestion of steam locomotives at the Hoboken Terminal, causing many delays. Some alternative for the future was required. Electrification could provide some cost savings as well as eliminate much switching for suburban train assembly, allow more rapid acceleration of the commuter trains, and offer more flexible operations during off-peak hours. Equally important, New Jersey communities served by the Lackawanna, alarmed at the implications for the future of continuing commuter traffic losses on the railroad, pledged to support an increase in fares to offset at least the cost of the improvement.

Thus, after some years of consideration--and even having bought in 1925 cars especially designed so they could be converted from steam railroad coaches to electric multiple-unit coaches--in April 1928 the Lackawanna Board of Directors approved electrification of 67 route miles (158 track miles) of its New Jersey suburban lines at a cost estimated to fall somewhere between $14,000,000 and $18,000,000. The lines to be electrified included the line from Hoboken via Morristown to Dover and those to Montclair and Gladstone. The company planned both to convert existing steel coaches to electric trailer coaches--and had bought 60 cars (50 coaches and ten combination baggage-passenger cars) in 1925 so designed that they could be easily converted if the railroad chose--and to buy new electric multiple-unit motor coaches.

The Lackawanna hired James S. Thorp from the Illinois Central's electrified lines to fill the position of engineer for electric traction. It should not be surprising that the Lackawanna system, therefore, would strongly resemble the Illinois Central system completed in 1926, from the rattan-covered seats in the cars to subtle elements such as the numbering of circuits in the catenary system.

The railroad commenced construction of its electric system in July 1929, setting the foundations for the catenary poles along the track. For this purpose the company employed a concrete mixer mounted on a flatcar to pour the foundations for the steel poles. The catenary system required 10,000 cubic yards of concrete and 8,000,000 pounds of steel.

Wire trains and crews then traveled the three lines being electrified, stringing guy wires, transmission lines, and finally the power wires for the catenary, as well as railroad signal lines. Regular steam passenger and freight service operated throughout this period over all these lines, so construction focused on midday hours between the morning and evening commuter rushes, on weekends, and during long summer days in the hours after the evening commute hours. The New York firm of Hatzel and Buehler built the electrical substations for the Lackawanna.

At Kingsland Car Shops, meanwhile, the Lackawanna shop force converted 118 steel vestibuled coaches built by Pullman between 1917 and 1925, 10 combination baggage-coaches built by Bethlehem Shipbuilding in 1925, five club cars built by Barney and Smith in 1912 and one by Pullman in 1917, and two combination Railway Post Office-Coach cars all into trailer cars, which they then semipermanently mated each to one of the newly built Pullman power cars built in 1930, No. 2505 among them. The railroad first energized a section of catenary on the line between East Secaucus and West End, and used that track to break in the new cars.

Engine and train crews, meanwhile, attended classes to learn how to operate electrically powered equipment. The Hoboken roundhouse force, their jobs terminated by the conversion from steam to electric, retrained as electricians and mechanics to work on the new rolling stock. The Lackawanna retained on the payroll the temporary inspectors whose job had been to ensure during construction that contractors met the construction specifications, retraining them to serve as power dispatchers and operators of the substations.

With electrification nearing completion, the railroad exhibited some of its new electrified rolling stock at Hoboken Terminal on August 21 and 22, 1930, attracting 21,441 people to the exhibit on those two days.

On September 3, 1930, the first passenger-carrying Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad electric multiple-unit train departed Hoboken for Montclair, New Jersey. Nearly all Americans would have known the engineer at the controls: Thomas Alva Edison, wearing a suit and vest with a bow tie and a dark homburg. A photographer recorded the scene with Lackawanna President J.M. Davis to the left of Edison and the railroad's Chairman William H. Truesdale to the right of him. President Davis later sent Edison a print inscribed:

Dear Mr. Edison:

This is the first electric train on the Lackawanna (September 3rd, 1930), which you started and ran for half a mile through the tracks and switches of our terminal observing all signals like the men whose duty it is to do this work daily.

J.M. Davis
President.

It was not until a wintry January day in 1931, however, that the company completed construction of its electric system, and the final changeover from steam-powered commuter trains to electric multiple-unit cars took place on January 25, 1931.

Some of the newly electrified trackage began hauling commuters in 1930, the rest in 1931, with 236 trains daily. The system employed equipment from substation apparatus to traction motors manufactured by the General Electric Company. The railroad purchased alternating current from public utility companies in northern New Jersey and fed it mostly by underground cable to trackside stations where mercury-arc rectifiers converted it to 3,000-volt direct current fed into overhead catenary wires hung above the tracks. The first system of this type in the nation, it required no line-side high-tension transmission lines; consequently, the initial cost of construction as well as subsequent maintenance costs were lowered, and the system avoided vulnerability to delays caused by bad weather.

In the initial installation, the Lackawanna employed 141 new motor cars built by Pullman Car and Manufacturing Company and 141 steel Pullman coaches rebuilt into trailer cars at the Berwick, Pennsylvania, plant of the American Car and Foundry Company. The railroad semipermanently coupled one trailer to each motor, so each two-car train had a control position and motorman's cab at the end of each two-car set. The two-car sets could be coupled together in multiples up to six sets or 12 cars. Low voltage control jumpers plugged into sockets of adjacent cars so one man could control the multiple units throughout the tram.

The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad assigned the numbers 2500 through 2640 to the new electric motor cars it purchased in 1930 and 1931. Sixth in the series, No. 2505, appeared out of the Pullman shops early in the construction program. Four inches shorter than the coaches built in 1925, the 2500 series seated 84 passengers. Weighing 74 tons, each car like No. 2505 had four 255-horsepower traction motors supplied by the General Electric Company that afforded an acceleration of one-and-a-half miles per second and a maximum speed on the level of 63 miles per hour. Descending a grade, where curves permitted, these cars, whose trucks featured Hyatt roller bearings, could reach 70 miles per hour. The large pantographs on the cars had been designed especially to maintain adequate wire contact through a vertical range of 8 feet, 3 inches, from the normal 24-foot height of the power wires down to 15 feet, 9 inches at Roseville Avenue. No. 2505 came from the first series of commuter cars ever constructed to use 3,000-volt direct current power. Their design had no flaws and as long as they were well maintained, the cars achieved nearly 100 percent availability for use even 30 years after they had been built, an amazing record.

As mentioned, each of these cars had two self-ventilated 235-horsepower series traction motors. These were the lightest of their kind and capacity ever built, 1,500-volt motors designed to operate two in a series per truck on 3,000 volts of direct current delivered from the trolley. All motors were identical, thus interchangeable, and insulated for the full 3,000 volts from the trolley.

One anomaly of the system was that the trailer cars ranged in date of construction from 1912 or 1914 to 1925, and while some of them had low clerestory roofs about the same height as those on the new electric motor coaches, others stood quite a bit higher, creating an irregular appearance when several sets of these coupled together, an aberration that was to remain as long as the cars ran.

Very little changed in the character of the cars or the operation over the years, but the corporate structure under which they operated changed greatly. In 1960, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad faced merger with the Erie Railroad. The Erie had originated as the New York and Erie Railroad incorporated in 1832, in a sense a successor or parallel to the Erie Canal on land.

To oversimplify a complex history, that firm became the Erie Railway in 1861, then the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad in 1878, and on November 14, 1895, reorganized as the Erie Railroad, which would operate through nearly two-thirds of the 20th century. It would require a small book to detail all of the mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations that went into the modern Erie. The Erie of the late 1950s operated a main line between New York City and Chicago with major branches to Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York; and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and with many lesser branches both north and south of its main lines. The Erie Railroad had completed dieselization by the end of 1954. It owned 2,014.65 miles of main track and controlled other lines for a total of 2,319.68 miles operated in 1957.

After several years' planning, the Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroads merged effective October 17, 1960, to form the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad Company, which in turn merged on April 1, 1968, into the Erie-Lackawanna Railway, a holding company incorporated in Delaware one month earlier. The Norfolk & Western Railway controlled that holding company.

As a consequence of this merger, the railroad soon relettered all of the electric cars such as No. 2505 "Erie Lackawanna" on the letterboards above the windows, and renumbered the cars into the 3000 series, No. 2505 becoming No. 3505. Another minor change involved the addition of a red light beneath the headlight on the end of the two-car sets. Under the Erie Lackawanna, the electric commuter service continued much as before, and with the same efficiency and comparative lack of trouble with the system.

Faced with intense competition from truck and bus lines and individually owned automobiles on subsidized highway systems, the railroads in the northeastern United States continued to experience declining fortunes. Bankruptcy rode the rails. It became necessary for the federal government to "bail out" a failing railroad system. To solve the problem, the United States Congress created the Consolidated Rail Corporation, better known as Conrail, as a private profit-making corporation to rescue six bankrupt railroad systems of the northeastern quarter of the country. Conrail arose from the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973, as amended by the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976. The Consolidated Rail Corporation began operations on April 1, 1976, and took over most of the railroad properties of the Penn Central Transportation Company, the Reading, the Lehigh Valley, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad, the Central of New Jersey, and the Erie-Lackawanna. Conrail had 17,000 route miles in Delaware, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Indiana, Kentucky, Connecticut, Virginia, New York, West Virginia, Missouri, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Among its New Jersey track miles were those of the former Erie-Lackawanna commuter service, whose operation Conrail now assumed.

Under Conrail, the quality of service and maintenance on the electric lines began to fall; both cars and service deteriorated somewhat. However, Conrail management was not destined to last very long. On July 16, 1979, a public agency, the New Jersey Transit Authority, became the sole owner of the Hoboken Terminal, and a little less than three and a half years later, on January 1, 1983, at a half hour after midnight, the New Jersey Transit Authority took over complete control of all of the commuter operations out of the Hoboken Terminal, including the old Lackawanna electric lines.

New Jersey Transit Authority decided as early as 1980 to rebuild the former Lackawanna electric commuter lines with 25,000-volt alternating current and re-equip them with Arrow III stainless steel air-conditioned cars that it had used for many years, often on old Pennsylvania Railroad electric lines. The target date for the change-over was the Labor Day weekend in 1984. The work involved construction of an entirely new power distribution system with new insulation on the catenary and new signalling systems. The 25,000-volt system had the advantage of operating off the regular commercial-frequency alternating current. As the date of completion of the new system approached, numerous events were planned to celebrate the passing of the old Lackawanna cars. The New Jersey Transit Authority held a farewell party at Maplewood on August 11, 1984, offering free train rides to all and an auction of appealing items of hardware off some of the old cars. The Tri-State Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society operated a fan trip on August 19 that carried 510 passengers on an eight-car train over the entire electric system, returning from Dover behind a diesel-electric locomotive over the non-electrified Boonton line.

The last day of regular direct-current electric operation proved to be Friday, August 24, the final trains departing Hoboken for Gladstone at 7:20 p.m. and departing Hoboken for Dover at 7:30 p.m. Aboard the Gladstone train, Homer Hill, who had ridden the first electric train into Gladstone back in 1931, now rode the last, 53 years later. At Dover, parlor car 3454, relettered Lackawanna" for the occasion, was met with a banner that read, "LAST RUN D.L.W. ELECTRICS/Jan. 21, 1931 to Aug. 24, 1984."

In the week that followed, New Jersey Transit killed the power, hauled commuter trains with diesel electric locomotives and added substitute bus service, and made the final conversion to alternating current for the Arrow cars. The old Lackawanna electrics had reached the end of their line. The New Jersey Transit Authority moved them to storage at Mahwah, New Jersey, pending final disposition. A number of them were expected to go to museums or to tourist railroads.

One of them, No. 3505, originally Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad No. 2505, went to an embryonic electric railroad museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and when that project failed, became the property of the Steamtown Foundation.

Condition: Ostensible exterior condition, fair to good; mechanical (and electrical) condition, unknown.

Recommendation: Because Car No. 2505 was built for and operated by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, and because it represents one of the two main alternatives to steam motive power on railroads, in this case especially for suburban service, it is recommended for preservation by Steamtown NHS. Furthermore, as this type of car typically operated in multiple-unit trains of a minimum of two cars, it is recommended that a suitable Lackawanna trailer be selected to be coupled to this car for exhibit purposes.

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad multiple unit electric No. 2501, a sister to Steamtown's No. 2505, posed with seven other units on a newly electrified three track main line when new.
Collection of John W. Barriger, III, St. Louis Mercantile Library.

Coates, Wes. "50 years of Lackawanna Electrics." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 3, No. 11 (July 1981): 48-53.

Dorin, Patrick C. Commuter Railroads: A Pictorial Review of the Most Travelled Railroads. New York: Bonanza Books, 1967: 60-66.

"Farewell to the Lackawanna Electrics." Railpace Newsmagazine, Vol. 3, No. 10 (Oct. 1984): 12-13.

Hyer, Richard, and John Zec. Railroads of New Jersey. n.p.: Published by the authors, n.d.: 21-37.

Jane's World Railways, 1986-1987. New York: Jane's Publishing, Inc., n.d.: 805-809.

Kessel, William C. "How to Put the Hyphen into Erie-Lackawanna." Trains, Vol. 20, No. 9 (July 1960):18-21.

Meehan, Thomas. 'This Can't Be Milburn: There's No Bar Across the Street." Trains, Vol. 38, No. 11 (Sept. 1978): 28-30.

Moody's Manual of investments, Railroad Securities, 1929. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1929: 276-279.

Moody's Transportation Manual, 1957. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1957: 627-644.

Moody's Transportation Manual, 1973. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1973: 727-749.

Moody's Transportation Manual, 1977. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1977: 280.

"The Night Before the Arrows." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 5, No. 11 (July 1985): 32-39.

"Railnews: The Last Run." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 5, No. 7 (Nov. 1984): 28, 29.

Scull, Theodore W. Hoboken's Lackawanna Terminal. New York: Quadrant Press, Inc., 1987.

Taber, Thomas T., and Thomas T. Taber III. The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Twentieth Century, 1899-1960. Muncy: Thomas T. Taber III, 1981 and 1983: 2 Vols.

Westing, Frederick. Erie Power. Medina: Alvin F. Staufer, 1970: 346-359.