LACKAWANNA CUTOFF ?

Here in NE Pennsylvania there is often talk and some hopeful dreaming about rebuilding the cut off, but until there is a real need for the line, I don't think you will see it.  The growth of the number  commuter residents in the Poconos has leveled off in the last decade.  Local politicians like to throw it there from time to time, but  then the interest seems to fade away.  Maybe the price of gasoline will skyrocket again some day and drive the need.  I sure would like to see it come back, but at best I think my grandchildren may see it.   

Not sure if it was tied to the Lackawanna cutoff that you refer, but I believe a couple of years ago NJ allocated additional funds to further study the feasibility of re-connecting NYC and Scranton/Poconos.  In typical PA govt. fashion - they putzed about.  Here's a link to a Pocono Record article from 2014.

http://www.poconorecord.com/ar...217/NEWS90/402170319

http://www.njtransit.com/tm/tm...eAction=Project019To

Check out Pg. 174 of this NJT pdf.

http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/NJStateRailPlan.pdf

The influx of NY/NJ transplants to PA may have leveled off over the past few years, but the daily traffic along I-80 between Stroudsburg/DEL Water Gap (as well as those along the northern I-84 area) and across NJ to the bridges/tunnels is still a PITA with PA commuters either driving or riding 5am buses into NYC.  A good number of which would likely be removed if a rail service was restored which also would benefit those commuters in Eastern NJ.  Obviously it takes money and re-activating/establishing right-of-ways.  Since it is typically more expensive to acquire or reacquire ROWs hopefully the ROW's were retained and not formally abandoned.

30 YEARS they have been saying that rail service would be restored over the DL&W cutoff, glad I didn't hold my breath. Conrail was offered a nice sum of money by PA when they made the announcement to abandoned the old lackawanna main line through PA. Conrail wanted more money, PA walked away from the deal and and one of the greatest build's of the lackawanna railroad was lost to greed. NJ or NJT at the time did not have any money to help buy the cutoff when conrail left the line. the last time I was close to the delaware river bridge it needed some serious tlc, concrete has fallen off exposing the rebar which has rusted away. the cutoff line has been abandoned for almost 38 years now, you would have to do a complete rebuild and top to bottom inspection on both bridges as they are now over 100 years old. if the paulin kills bridge looks anything like the delaware bridge, expect both of them to be torn down and replaced. 

When I first started visiting the Poconos in 1987, there was a lot of talk about there being a train within five years. When I built a house in Pike County, PA in 1994, they were still talking about there being a train within five years. A couple of years ago, they changed their tune... they had money to do a study (which would take two years) and then would work on building the inferstructure (which would take about three years)... Wait a minute... two plus three is... never mind???

Now that I am retired, it doesn't really effect me one way or the other. That being said, I think there are two points which must be considered. The first, mentioned in the Pocono Record article cited above, is that the estimated travel time would be nearly three hours each way (not including time to get from the end destination in Manhattan to your ultimate destination if you don't work near wherever the train leaves you). As someone who did 17 years of crazy commuting into either Manhattan or to Westchester County, NY, let me say that, even on a train, you will get really stressed out. The second is the cost of the commute. Currently, the Metro-North/NJ Transit monthly commuter fare from Port Jervis NY (just over the boarder from Pike County, PA) to Penn Station in Manhattan is $473. I cringe to think what the fare on the proposed new line would be today, much less in the future should the line be completed. While I can't argue with the assessment of PA politicians expressed in the Pocono Record article, in the final analysis, they may be on the right track (pun intended).

I would guess it is in stasis, several years ago it was a big item in the local papers and online discussion forums, people claiming that the infamous garbage trains would use the line if they built it,that they would ship toxic waste on it, which from what I have been told by rail experts is not true, that line has too steep grades for it to be useful that way.  I know they were doing survey work on the Paulinskill viaduct,and there was talk they were going to take back the roadbed on that line from being a walking/hiking trail, but as far as I know nothing came of it.

I suspect among other factors, that the crash of 2008 killed it off. The reason for reactivating it was people who lived in the poconos and were commuting to NYC, either by bus or driving to rail or bus stops in NJ, but since 2008 that growth has died off. And NJ transit is not exactly flush with money, they have a budget deficit last I checked that needed filling, so I doubt even with federal help if they would have the funds to build that, plus PA would need to share in it, and they were not likely to have funds for that, either. I don't think you'll see the Lackawanna cutoff built unless there is a return to growth of people commuting from the Poconos, and I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. The other option people talked about at one point was a high speed rail link down the middle of route 80, but given that the center median they were counting on using has been cut to nothing in some spots (they recently widened it west and east of the 287 junction), and that would cost even more, I wouldn't hold my breath on that one, either

Apples55 and Bigkid are both correct in their assessments. Every few years another generation (now it is the sainted millennials) think that adding rail between Scranton/Poconos or from here in the Lehigh Valley will be their transit heaven. Logistics aside there is no moral justification for taxing the general public to ease the time and financial burden of a relative few who choose to live over one hundred miles from their jobs. What we'll get in Pa is higher school and other taxes. As an ex-patriated Bronxite (I came to Pa before it was cool and Routes 80 and 78 weren't close to completion) I took job here and lived here. Local officials will have a spring 'test drive' of a train trip from the Lehigh Valley to NYC to try to gin up support for eventual service. Fact is that the Feds' will kick in about half the needed funding, which means locals must kick in the rest. And half of several billion$ of dollars is still billion$ of dollars.  In PA we have NO money (nor a budget) and Jersey is in no better shape. 

I have a novel idea: let's have local officials recruit the companies in NY to move where the people are, not the other way around. 

Also, for the 'professional class' whomever they are to use the train for commuting purposes, think of this scenario. A guy lives in an Allentown suburb and drives 30 minutes to get to the train station; then a nearly 3-hour trip to NY, including switching from diesel to electric in Newark, Jersey City or elsewhere. Upon arrival at Penn Station in NY the poor sap might have another 15 minute walk to work...or worse, a subway ride. Fuggetaboudit!

I remember ready someplace that when Conrail put the "Cutoff" up for sale, neither New Jersey nor Pennsylvania wanted to purchase it. Finally some private party purchased it, and subsequently began removing some of the dirt (?). The politicians became very up set, and tried to stop the operation. Eventually, New Jersey purchased it (NJDOT?), for about twice what the private party paid for it, and the commuter traffic only got as far as Port Morris. Still, nothing has yet to materialize for commuter traffic across the "Cutoff" to Stroudsburg  or Scranton.  Way too bad, as it used to be a beautiful piece of railroad.

Taxpayer money spent on "surveys" to restore the cutoff over the past twenty five years probably could have rebuilt it ten times over...........

There is probably no good reason at this time to continue with the project.  There are other NJT projects that should be moved forward but given the state of the budget, none of these are likely to proceed soon.  It is a part of history now and should remain so.  Better projects would be an expansion of the light rail north to Englewood, re activation of the line between West Trenton and Bound Brook, the Monmouth-Middlesex link through Jamesburg to South Brunswick.  In reality only the first one has a chance of being started in the next decade.  This project is similar in nature to the reactivation of commuter rail through Easton to Allentown.  Might be a pleasant ride but the trip would be too slow and not attract sufficient passengers to make the investment worth while.

I've walked that line. None of the bridges require complete replacement, despite age.

.

S

necrails posted:

 This project is similar in nature to the reactivation of commuter rail through Easton to Allentown.  Might be a pleasant ride but the trip would be too slow and not attract sufficient passengers to make the investment worth while.

 

Exactly. Just a few years ago a major study was done by NJ and PA government and transit agencies to determine the feasibility of rail travel between the Lehigh Valley and NYC. The projected ridership was about 1,400 trips a day. Meanwhile we enjoy excellent express bus service to the city that gets you to Port Authority in about 90 minutes from Bethlehem. (Heck, it took me that long to use MTA buses and subways when I lived in the Bronx and commuted to the Financial District). Problem for some today is that those are private bus companies with no taxpayer subsidies for the poor folks to seem to hate working in New York but love living in the Lehigh Valley.

As a stopgap measure I would suggest that NJ Transit rent the thousands of parking spaces at the Meadowlands during the 'work week' then shuttle people in on buses. Those parking spaces are never used Mon-Fri during 'business hours".

necrails posted:

<Snip>......This project is similar in nature to the reactivation of commuter rail through Easton to Allentown.  Might be a pleasant ride but the trip would be too slow and not attract sufficient passengers to make the investment worth while.

 

Since when has that stopped politicians who have the peoples' money burning a hole in their pockets?

We have an entire federally operated passenger train agency, since 1971, which is a perfect illustration of that.

Nick Chillianis posted:

necrails posted:

<Snip>......This project is similar in nature to the reactivation of commuter rail through Easton to Allentown.  Might be a pleasant ride but the trip would be too slow and not attract sufficient passengers to make the investment worth while.

 

Since when has that stopped politicians who have the peoples' money burning a hole in their pockets?

We have an entire federally operated passenger train agency, since 1971, which is a perfect illustration of that.

I read things like this all the time, and it gets me angry, because while I am no defender of the intelligence of things the government can do (and they do some whoppers), it makes it sound like somehow government is this mysterious man behind the curtain doing things for themselves. What this usually translates into is someone looking at something like this, and saying "look at that waste of money" because they don't see how it helps them or don't see how they happen.

Amtrak is a pretty good example of that. It came about when the US railroads, in part because of changing demographics, in part because of government regulations that were helping to strangle the railroads (and support the trucking industry, which had a large swath of political power behind it, whether long haul trucking made sense or not in some or many cases, and had its own boondoggles), and in large part to bad management that couldn't adjust to the changes in demographics after WWII, was in deep trouble, and they basically on a whole decided to drop passenger service. When Amtrak was formed,there was an attempt to decide what would make sense to keep, and original proposals for it involved dropping the routes that made no sense, like long distance train service that airplane travel had killed off, and a lot of intermediate routes that likewise made no sense.  

Was it the government bureaucrats who created Amtrak the way we see it? No, it was a ton of local politicians, backed by local outrage, who demanded that "their" towns were important and shouldn't lose passenger train service. Towns where train traffic was light, saw this as just another attempt to kill off small town America, and the local congressmen and women and Senators from that state fought it. I would also bet that if you went to those towns and small cities, and talked to people, you would hear a lot of them rumbling about the government and it doing things stupidly. 

Likewise I would bet that local politicians were all for the Easton to Allentown link, as many were for the Lackwanna cutoff.  Towns along that line saw the possibility of people actually moving to their towns, and maybe reversing years of stagnation, that maybe commuters to NYC would turn around falling real estate prices and also maybe generate jobs locally,too, since the newcomers would need houses or renovate them, need stores, etc (and yes, bringing kids who would need schools which in turn lead to higher property taxes, but amazingly, people don't think about that). There is the local myopia, not surprising, that sees things locally as good and things elsewhere as wasted spending.

Plenty of people said the same thing about Conrail, that they should just have let the railroads go under, go bankrupt, that if the railroads were really needed they wouldn't have gone under, or that other railroads would have bought them in bankruptcy (of course, the biggest pusher for this were the lobbyists for the trucking industry, gee, what a surprise). A lot of those people, who probably didn't live in the affected regions, would have been shocked at the impact on their lives, the coal miners whose coal still fired a lot of power plants in the northeast would have lost a way to ship it, cars would have been a lot more difficult to get (especially imported cars, just then starting to grow in number), plants would have had a hard time getting steel from the plants in their area. The reality was no private railroad would touch a lot of those roads, they were in bad shape, poorly run, and it wasn't until Conrail, through the government, invested money in the rail plant and equipment, and also in developing better shipping methods (and not to mention, thanks to Conrail being government run, finally getting the idiotic ICC regs that crippled the railroads in terms of pricing and gave trucks a huge giveaway, removed, despite the squalling of the long haul trucking industry), and being able to drop unprofitable and unneeded routes in a lot of areas that simply couldn't justify having rail access (some lost it completely, and trucks served them, others had small branch lines take over those routes). It was only then, that private rail got interested in buying Conrail.

That doesn't mean that for example, the Lackawanna Cutoff or the Easton to Allentown route makes sense (among other things, given the population and business activity in the region, and where the businesses are located, such a commuter line makes almost no sense, except to local politicians), or that dumb things are not down. Spending money on something like Steamtown by the federal government made no sense in some ways, yet it did leave something behind for people to enjoy, and did in some ways create a tourist attraction that helped local businesses *shrug*.  The irony is a lot of times the people yelling about 'the government spending money on stupid things' often are the beneficiary of a lot of that spending, and are guilty of the same myopia I am talking about, or more importantly, their role in these kind of things happening. Politicians, however smart or dumb they are, act not on what they see really needs to be done, but rather on what they perceive as what their people think need to be done, and will make decisions based on local political perceptions a lot more than what they think needs to be done, it is the operating method of politics.

And put it this way, if they decided to reformulate Amtrak, and keep Amtrak to the routes that make sense, like the Northeast corridor, and invest money in high speed rail and new tunnels into NYC and access to DC and Boston, and drop the passenger rail network that eats up a lot of cost and operates at a major loss (and is reflected, I might add, in the ticket prices people say are so high; one of the reason train tickets are so high is because it needs to subsidize the most unprofitable routes that go through much of this country), it would be politically unpopular in towns that would lose passenger service, and they would be calling it nothing but a boondoggle for those that kept it. 

bigkid 

 

Likewise I would bet that local politicians were all for the Easton to Allentown link, as many were for the Lackawanna cutoff.  Towns along that line saw the possibility of people actually moving to their towns, and maybe reversing years of stagnation, that maybe commuters to NYC would turn around falling real estate prices and also maybe generate jobs locally,too, since the newcomers would need houses or renovate them, need stores, etc (and yes, bringing kids who would need schools which in turn lead to higher property taxes, but amazingly, people don't think about that). There is the local myopia, not surprising, that sees things locally as good and things elsewhere as wasted spending.

Plenty of people said the same thing about Conrail, that they should just have let the railroads go under, go bankrupt, that if the railroads were really needed they wouldn't have gone under, or that other railroads would have bought them in bankruptcy (of course, the biggest pusher for this were the lobbyists for the trucking industry, gee, what a surprise). A lot of those people, who probably didn't live in the affected regions, would have been shocked at the impact on their lives, the coal miners whose coal still fired a lot of power plants in the northeast would have lost a way to ship it, cars would have been a lot more difficult to get (especially imported cars, just then starting to grow in number), plants would have had a hard time getting steel from the plants in their area. The reality was no private railroad would touch a lot of those roads, they were in bad shape, poorly run, and it wasn't until Conrail, through the government, invested money in the rail plant and equipment, and also in developing better shipping methods (and not to mention, thanks to Conrail being government run, finally getting the idiotic ICC regs that crippled the railroads in terms of pricing and gave trucks a huge giveaway, removed, despite the squalling of the long haul trucking industry), and being able to drop unprofitable and unneeded routes in a lot of areas that simply couldn't justify having rail access (some lost it completely, and trucks served them, others had small branch lines take over those routes). It was only then, that private rail got interested in buying Conrail.

That doesn't mean that for example, the Lackawanna Cutoff or the Easton to Allentown route makes sense (among other things, given the population and business activity in the region, and where the businesses are located, such a commuter line makes almost no sense, except to local politicians), or that dumb things are not down. Spending money on something like Steamtown by the federal government made no sense in some ways, yet it did leave something behind for people to enjoy, and did in some ways create a tourist attraction that helped local businesses *shrug*.  The irony is a lot of times the people yelling about 'the government spending money on stupid things' often are the beneficiary of a lot of that spending, and are guilty of the same myopia I am talking about, or more importantly, their role in these kind of things happening. Politicians, however smart or dumb they are, act not on what they see really needs to be done, but rather on what they perceive as what their people think need to be done, and will make decisions based on local political perceptions a lot more than what they think needs to be done, it is the operating method of politics.

 

 

 

You are correct about many local politicians. And the younger they are the more 'into it' they get, because they want everything they think is cool in Europe! And all politicians see a flood of new residents adding to the coffers of local governments and school districts....not seeming to care about the costs that bring to residents already in their communities. And yes, once the rail starts running through the communities of New Jersey you can bet they will be yelling for a station. It is no different than when they were building the interstates. Route 22 through the Lehigh Valley is a good example of 'we want an exit' in my town. In the Allentown area there are about 4 exits within 2 miles causing crazy backups. Then again, that was designed in the 50s when they never anticipated the flood of people from the east.

What is often left unsaid is the Federal formula that 'matches' local contributions to projects like this. I have no idea where the rail enthusiasts think we are going to come up with billions of dollars....not to mention ongoing subsidies to operate the thing. 

It's unlikely that any movement will be made on the Lackawanna cutoff.

The State of Pennsylvania is billions of dollars in debt.  The Federal Government is trillions of dollars in debt.    Spending cuts OR taxes alone will never fix this.

Consumer debt continues to skyrocket and actual employment is down from 64 to 62 percent, it's lowest rate in decades.  

School and property taxes continue to rise along with healthcare costs.  Fixed costs for taxpayers continue to rise while real income continues to drop.  This, coupled with dwindling employment,  limits the revenue level at all levels of government.

I've sat in some of the public hearings on rail restoration.  Whether it's NYC to Scranton or NYC to Allentown or Philadelphia to Allentown or the 422 Corridor to Pottstown,  the facts remain the same.

The costs for restoration are massive and the funding sources unrealistic.  And the rail service proposed is no quicker than the current bus service OR than what was offered fifty or so years ago when the rail service ended.

Unless this changes (or cars are outlawed or gasoline taxed out of reach) the restoration of rail service for these suburban markets is doomed.