Utica Observer-Dispatch, Sunday, April 7, 1957
Many Unofficial ‘Owners’ Saddened by the Finale
An old railroad never dies.
Nor does it fade away. It lives on in the hopes and hearts of those who ran it and who loved it.
Take the “Old and Weary,”whose obituary was filed away a little more than a week ago in the bulging archives of Uncle Sam’s tax department - executed for $14 million in unpaid taxes, a victim of an advancing civilization after 86 years of usefulness.
There’s Hank Kortright, a 72-year-old bantam rooster engineer in high black shoes - cantankerous outside and all heart and eating tobacco inside. It is his railroad - the New York, Ontario and Western.
When Jerry Handte, Binghamton Press reporter, plodded through the Norwich yards that funeral afternoon after an eight-hour, 147-mile ride from Middletown to Norwich, Hank called out:
“We're going to keep her going!”
By ‘‘we,” he meant, the easy Fred Schild, a cigar-smoking flagman — Thomas Carmody, his fireman, and on through 1,100 employees.
The woman who smiled as she stooped to pick up a newspaper tossed out of the caboose at Fish’s Eddy; the little girl at Walton who waved—it is their railroad, too.
A railroad belongs to those who have heard the steam hissing from the valves of a sooty eight - wheeler. It belongs to those who love it.
How do you stop a railroad? How do you stop people from loving her?
Railroads are magic because they go somewhere in spectacularly visible and audible fashion. The businesslike diesels don’t match the old steamers, with their connecting rods pumping and their whistles screaming.
But the sickening slam of cars taking up the slack in a bone shaking stop is there, and the braying honk of the horn.
Railroads also are magic because they are monumental, old. The O&W—the “Old and Weary” was like all railroads in many ways.
The station at Middletown, operating headquarters, is a big oblong of soot-blackened brick. The diesel shops are bigger.
The fragile-looking high trestles, the dark tunnels exploded out of Catskill granite, they were meant for permanence.
Streamlined automobiles are designed to be old fashioned before the payments are completed. Airliners ride the air so high and fast they pass unnoticed. These are toys beside the ponderous size and noise of railroading.
That is why the reporter getting aboard the caboose of No. 9 in the nearly empty Middletown yards could not sense the end of the New York, Ontario & Western.
Who would break up a diesel locomotive for scrap? Who would pick up 550 miles of track from the Atlantic through the middle of the state to Lake Ontario?
“We'll need extra cars coming back, for the mourners,” said Fred Shild, the flagman.
“Railroaders AND customers.”
It was the first reference aboard No. 9 to the shutdown, only three days off.
“We won't need them either,’ Wilbur (Wilby) Wilson, the Middletown trainmaster, riding No. 9 to Cadosia, corrected him. “If anyone rides back with you, they'll have a long walk home.”
Cabooses are bigger inside than they seem from the outside. This one had a pot-bellied coal stove in the center, a conductor’s desk at the rear (actually a folding wooden table top) benches cushioned with worn black leather on either side, a gasoline lantern on the desk. It had a clothes closet and wire coat hangers.
Up above was the first Vista Dome, that raised gimmick you see from the outside, with windows on all sides.
Leon Tompkins, the conductor and senior member of the crew with service from 1908, and Ed Griswold, the rear brakeman, who joined the O&W 10 years later, hauled themselves up as though getting into upper berths, onto two window benches in the cupola. “You can see your train from up there,” explained Fred. “Spot trouble.”
Later, the reporter was shown the emergency air brake control in the cupola, the only means the caboose crew has of signaling the engineer.
The O&W, then the New York and Oswego Midland, was founded in 1866 with the idea that Oswego would become a great commercial port for Great Lakes steamers.
Leaving Weehawken and probing for the most direct route to Oswego about 240 miles, the builders happened to hit upon the lovely, mountainous country for which the road is famous.
Tuesday, March 26, was a sullen, gray day. The earth was still barren, brown and old. The beauty had to be seen by imagination, how it looked to the summer resort people, the Bronxites on the way to Livingston Manor for the July 4 weekend, before passenger service folded in 1953.
“This railroad made its money on coal, milk and passengers.Now they’re all gone,” Wilbur Wilson mused. “And I’m too young (55) for a pension, and too old to get another job. This used to be milk train, No. 9,” Fred said.
The train changed to a stop, throwing the reporter off balance into a bench.
He was told there 10 inches of slack in each coupling. The longer the train, the worse the accumulated jolt in the caboose. This train had five cars, four of them empty. More jolt and the O&W might not be in receivership. “I’ve run up here on Nine with 150, 200 cars, extra engines behind,” Ed Griswold said.
The train waited where the line switched from a double track to a single track, waiting for a southbound freight to pass. It was NE-4, coming from Lehigh Valley and DL&W connections to the west, bound for Maybrook, near the Hudson River, a link with the New York, New Haven & Hartford.
Someone counted 122 cars. Most of them were empties, The O&W under an embargo, was permitted to take no new freight orders. The trains were picking up cars, taking O&W rolling stock home for the last time, taking the cars of other railroads to junction points for return.
“That used to be a big train, maybe 300. This was a bridge railroad, hauling freight from one line to another,” said Leon Tompkins. “Trouble with that, we pay rental for cars owned by other roads. The trick is to get rid of the empties before midnight, otherwise you pay another day’s rent, like a hotel.”
Hank Kortright seemed to have little to do but sound his horn for crossing's. His controls were simple, and their use explained by a colored diagram in front of him.
“Steam was more fun. There was a lot of clatter and row to it, and you could let her out when you had a chance. These things run themselves. And they’ve got a governor on the damn things,” Hank said.
“Tom don’t think steam was better, I'd a had him busy with that long handled shovel, moving coal.”
“Oh, they were dirty, the steamers,” Tom Carmody said. “Everyone was black with cinders and soot. Even the passengers, the summer trade. They’d insist on opening the windows in the tunnels.”
Later he took the reporter back inside and a diesel engine became something of beauty, compact, like a submarine, and scary with cabinets painted “Danger. 600 volts.”
Ferndale, Liberty, Livingston Manor, the bonscht belt off season. Big hotels. East Branch, Fish’s Eddy, Cadosia in the trout country. Small lumber yards, a stone quarry, feed mills, no big industry.
Then to Walton.“This used to be a big point before Crawford’s mill burned. Feed, limestone, sand. Fifty or 60 cars in the yards, loaded all the time,” said Tom Natoli, the Norwich trainmaster, who had come on at Cadosia.
From Walton into Norwich there was practically no business, hardly any people visible, rolling hills, scenery. The train came into Norwich toward dusk, with 16 cars, 15 empty.
“We're going to keep her going fellow. Come back for another ride,” said Hank.
The reporter recalled a meeting before the run with Robert H. McGraw, a big, bluff Irishman saddened by a job he was asked to do too late.
“Too little and too late,” he had said of his appointment by the receivers as general manager in charge of last-minute miracles.
“Maybe it’s a grace in disguise. Maybe there’s a lesson in it for all railroads,” he said.
“Your passengers have gone, your milk has gone, your less-than-carload freight has gone
between the trucks and the airplanes.”
Industrial development with communities zoning adequate space for industry before industry comes looking for space can save railroads, the retired New York Central western district general manager said.
“No industries mean no railroad, and communities must realize, no railroads mean no industries,” he said. “That’s why the communities are stupid to let railroads go.”
Mr. McGraw said that “without criticizing anyone” he wanted to say that little or nothing had been done since the O&W went bankrupt in 1937 to bring new business to replace lost business.
“Of course no one wants to do business with a bankrupt,” he acknowledged.
He cited new General Electric and Niagara Mohawk Power Co. plants at New Hartford, on the O&W Rome-Utica spur, as a tragic example of lost business.
“The plants give their business to another road. Yet most plants today want two railroads. And, in the smaller communities, industry wants the space available, including parking space.”
Planning could have brought industries to the pastoral O&W main line, Mr. McGraw thought. “Industrial people have lost their confidence in the O&W,” said the husky executive, who came on the job last Feb. 9.
The O&W once had 3,000 employees, it had 1,100 when it folded. Fortunately, an estimated third have reached retirement age, and another third is close. Since 1937, few men have been hired. The crew of No. 9 was typical, one man with the road since 1908, three since 1911, another since 1918, another since 1921.
Railroaders with 30 years service are entitled to full pensions at 65, partial pensions earlier.
Another casualty of the collapse is the failure of small industries dependent on the road.
Other railroads have been given permission to run over portions of the O&W right-of-way. O&W men have territorial rights to work there. But it won’t be the same.
“This may be the largest railroad ever to close down,” said Mr. McGraw.
The bulletin posted on the O&W freight house in Utica appeared no more conspicuous, no more impressive than any others posted there. Yet it marked a final page in a chapter of railroad history that left its mark in the entire county area. It was terse, it was curt.
It read:
“The railroad will cease operation at 11:59 p.m., Friday, March 29, 1957.” It was signed T. B. Girard, assistant general manager.
But the railroad fever gets into the bloodstream of those who have lived in it for almost as long as they can remember. It takes more than the medication of retirement to get rid of it. Perhaps, for some, it will mean taking it to the grave.
At any rate, those who have contracted it have learned to live with it. It becomes a personal thing, like an omni-present companion, faithful and dependable to the end.
Railroad men and their railroad become like something Lindbergh had in mind when he described his Atlantic trip in the Spirit of St. Louis.
Once possessed with the railroad fever, then, a railroad man talks of it like a treasured companion. Just as a man may speak of “my friend,” a professional railroad man may speak of “my railroad.”
Thus, only a few short hours before the O&W was to write “finis” to its service of almost 90 years, it was only natural that Leo Mengel would be found sitting in his office wondering about what was going to happen next.
He had been an O&W employee since 1915 and freight agent for the railroad since 1950. He sat in his office in Division St. talking about “my railroad.”
His case was typical of many. But this was the beginning of the end. He had just received instructions to close up the place and leave the keys. Nothing else. No word about the future or the hope, if any, for the valiant railroad. He could visualize the quiet of a train now out of sight; the tracks taking on the somber appearance of abandoned skeletons of steel and wood. Only now it would be this way for a much longer time than until “the next freight” was due.
And, it would be for the entire 541 winding miles of track between Weehawken, N. J. and the Port of Oswego.
Oneida Daily Dispatch, Monday, April 10, 1957
Dispatch Newsman Is Last O & W Passenger
By Richard Baldwin
(Dispatch State Editor)
History books someday may report that passenger service on the New York, Ontario & Western Railway was suspended some 10 years before the line from Weehawken, N.J., to Oswego went out of existence at 11:59 p.m., Friday, March 29, 1957. However, I was the last passenger to buy a ticket on the O& W.*
Last train arrives at Oneida, March 29, 1957. Photos by the late railroad historian William F. Helmer
For $3.94, including 52 cents of tax, I purchased a round-trip ticket from Oneida to Fulton on the last O&W train ever to make that trip. With the assist from a kindly conductor who was ending 46 years’ service with the New York, Ontario & Western, I made a round trip to the end of the line at Oswego - a few miles more than my ticket called for.
I didn’t have first-class passenger accommodations on this last trip of the “Old Woman.” Instead, I enjoyed a comfortable ride in the caboose and for awhile, in the cab of the Diesel-electric locomotive.
The last northbound d O&W train to pass the old Oneida station pulled in at 7:55 a.m. Friday with Charles “Chick” Miner, 108 North Lake St., as conductor and Leo Marrone, Norwich, as engineer. It took the crew only five minutes to shunt a few cars onto a siding, then continue on its way toward the Oswego terminal. The cars left in the Oneida yards wee destined for transfer to the nearby New York Central tracks.
When the train eased out of the yards and across the Sconondoa St. crossing, it must have been the shortest regularly-scheduled train ever to head up the O&W mainline. It consisted only of a two-unit Diesel-electric locomotive and a small red caboose.
There was a dismal air about the caboose as the little train picked up speed on tracks paralleling North Lake St., then passing under the New York State Thruway and crossing Oneida Creek. The sky was overcast and raindrops began to sprinkle against the caboose windows as the train lost a little speed climbing an elevation leading to the bridge over the Erie Canal north of Durhamville.
Also in the caboose on the trip northward was George Cavanaugh, a native Oneidan who had been a brakeman on the Utica branch of the O&W. He made his last trip as a crew member on that branch the previous day and was riding to Oswego as a passenger to recall memories of the days when he worked on the mainline.
Crosses Barge Canal
Cavanaugh jumped from his seat to wave at a man in a field near the Fish Creek Landing road. The train’s speed decreased to 15 miles an hour as it crossed the old bridge over the Barge Canal at Sylvan Beach; the bridge the highway bridge clearly was visible.
Further along, there was evidence of an old roadbed which left the mainline to serve Sylvan Beach but the tracks long ago had been removed. The mainline passes behind the cottages along the Oneida Lake shore, but heavy fog made it impossible to see far onto the lake.
As we crossed Route 13, big piles of ice were visible along the lake-shore, almost symbolizing to the crew that both winter and he O&W were coming to an end at the same time. As the train picked up a little speed, Cavanaugh pointed out that track in that area had been repaired only last Fall.
It still was dreary outside, but men inside the warm caboose now were reading the morning newspapers in search of a story which might tell them the O&W had been given a new lease on life. They normally sit up there and look along the train to watch for “hot boxes” and derailments. But Friday, the two hits of the locomotive were all they had to watch.
The rest of the train's crew was seated comfortably on four benches which line the walls of the little office on wheels. Colorful calendars imprinted with railroad scenes decorated the walls, but the calendar pads had long since disappeared from most of them.
The sun was starting to peep through an overpass sky, and it was not necessary for the men to light the kerosene lanterns to read their papers. We now were passing a pretty wooded area marked with stately white Birches and the conversation in the caboose began to flow a little more freely.
Familiar Landmarks
As the telegraph poles besides the track - dotted with their green and white insulators - ticked off the miles, the trainmen took long looks at familiar landmarks: the cemetery near Cleveland crossing, the school at Cleveland and a trim white church with another graveyard.
Although these men had been working since early morning, when the train left Norwich, much of the rest of the country was just beginning its day. Children were scurrying into the school from a bus stopped nearby. Chickens and ducks in a farmyard nodded “good morning” as the train passed. A man in a car at a rural crossing gave to hearty waves to the passing train.
As we passed a fish hatchery and a cluster of homes at Constantia, someone pointed out, “everybody seems to know this is the last trip.” Yet the reception on this trip was nothing compared to what it would be a few hours later when the same train would make the return trip over this same track.
One by one, the crew members introduced themselves. Besides the engineer and conductor, they were FlagmanEdward Swertfager, Trainmen P. E. Osborne and A. J. Natoli and Fireman William Fleming, all of Norwich.
For the first time, electric signals along the road blinked on as we neared Central Square, where the O&W tracks cross the New York Central’s at a right-angle grade crossover.
The station agent at Central Square was the only one remaining between Oneida and Fulton; but at one time there many stations along the way: Durhamville, State Bridge, Sylvan Beach North Bay, West Vienna, Cleveland, Bernhard’s Bat, Constantia and West Monroe.
As we neared Fulton, we passed a long siding at Pennellville but there were wee no longer cars on the siding and he rails had grown rusty. Familiar landmarks wee the muckland farms and a switch whee the New York Central tracks from Syracuse cut into the O&W line.
End of Run
A black dog dashed up to greet the train as it pulled into Fulton. It was only a few minutes before we were in Oswego - the end of the line.
While the train crew took time out for lunch, the engine was backeding into the repair barn to be looked over for the last time by Roundhouse Foreman John Sullivan and Car Inspector Francis Serow. Sullivan had been with the railroad 37 years and Serow 33 years. Cullivan’s grandfather and father also had been employees while Serow’s father and son have worked on the same road.
The locomotive was number 805 and the caboose, which waited alone on a siding, was number 8345. Men at the end of the line said the two units of the locomotive weighed 229 tons. They are owned by the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Co. of New York, not by the bankrupt railway.
After the inspection was completed, I was invited to take the throttle of the giant General Motors locomotive to ease it out of the repair barn on its last trip south. I truthfully can say I drove the last engine out of the Oswego terminal. The return trip was a little different. Most of the tension of the crew had ben released during the stop-over at the end of the line and it was a happy ride back.
We picked up 19 empty cars at Fulton for return to the railway’s headquarters at Middletown. We also picked up two “dead” switch engines which had been used at the Fulton yards. Another empty car remained to be coupled on at Bernhard’s Bay - then the rest of the trip would be just a ride back to Norwich, where the crew was to go off duty.
Look Different
Automobiles were lined up at crossings so people could have a last look at the train some called “Old & Weary.” Some persons myst have waited at trackside for hours to make sure they didn’t miss the final trip.
The Diesel’s bell and air whistle combined to sing a swan-song at every crossing. There were few dry eyes. Someplace along the way I left the caboose and ode for awhile in the engine. This time the fireman was a the controls and Engineer Marrone was at the widow waking toward familiar homes along the way. Every now and then he called, “Good-bye … so long, everybody.”
The 114-mile round trip from Oneida to Oswego was completed at 4:20 p.m.
As the last train peeked under the underpass which carries the New York Central Railroad tracks over the O&W, we could see the “welcoming committee” at the Oneida station. There were more automobiles at the station than had been there in years.
Members of the conductor’s family were on hand to greet him. A handful of persons, including Station Agent William J. Sheehan of Munnsville, were taking pictures.
Photographers Busy
There was little reason to stop at Oneida. But the train stopped anyway, to accommodate the photographers. It even backed up then continued ahead again so I could take the picture printed on the front page of today’s edition of The Oneida Daily Dispatch.
When the train pulled out at 4:35 p.m., it would seem that the story of the last trip of the O&W had ended. But it was not quite over as yet.
In the excitement of the picture-taking and well-wishing at the station, somebody forgot to pick up the last batch of company mail destined for Middletown. The agent later arranged for the mail to be taken to Norwich by car, and from there to Middletown on the train.
It didn’t take long for the crowd to disperse and for Sheehan to lock the station for the last time. I went back there today and there were no automobiles, no people - no trains. . .
It looked as though the weeds already were starting to grow up through the railroad times . . .
Everyone knew now that there would be no more trains.
*Passenger service between Oneida and Oswego with the motor car was discontinued June 27, 1929 and the milk train, #9 and #10 discontinued carrying passengers December 15, 1931.
