The Rockaway Valley Railroad - One of New Jersey's Earliest Railroad Abandonments

The Rockaway Valley Railroad was a short line railroad extending from White House Station on the Central Railroad of New Jersey,  to Watnong, NJ near present-day Morristown, NJ, just over 24 miles north along a northeasterly route. (Right of way). 

A northern extension that was never built would have connected the road to Morristown and the Delaware Lackawanna & Western Railroad's Morristown-Essex Division.

Photo from Tom Taber III, “The Rock -A-Bye Baby, A History of the Rockaway Valley Railroad”

Constructed mainly to aid in New Jersey's peach industry in 1888, traffic along the line would only last about 25 years, although it would also haul passengers and other freight. Like many short lines of the day, it was constructed cheaply, and thus accidents and derailments were common along the line.

However, even before the line began service, the peaches in its first year were blighted as a result of a pathogen. Sadly, this would set the stage for the rest of the railroad's life.

1910 map showing RVRR line in Morris County, from Ralston station to Watnong station. (Wikipedia Commons)

In 1915, the company was reorganized as the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Railroad. Nonetheless, the company could not muster up the funds necessary to complete the planned extension to the Lackawanna, an extension which may have opened up potential freight traffic to use the line as a bypass of sorts.

Looking west at Whitehouse Station toward RVRR station on right across from still standing CNJ (now New Jersey Transit) station at near left, 1915. The sign on the RVRR station reads "New Jersey and Penna RR," the name the RVRR carried for most of the last bit of its existence.


Reorganization did not lead to long term success, however, and abandonment occurred just two years later in 1917, with everything scrapped and sold off by the following year.


Most of the right of way would be incorporated into the Patriots Path Trail.

Thanks as always for reading!

Location: Whitehouse Station, Readington Township, NJ, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Choum Tunnel: The Monument to European Stupidity in Africa

Image
Scars of European colonization are located all across Africa, although some are more obscure and strange than others. With that in mind we come to the Choum Tunnel , built in Mauritania when it was controlled by the French. At first glance, it seems like an ordinary railway tunnel, however, one look at the local geography and you'll find yourself asking what its builders were possibly thinking with creating the project. Choum Tunnel in Mauritania. Unknown photographer. The Mauritania Railway was being built in the early 1960s, and was planned to connect Nouadhibou to Zouérat to exploit the iron ore reserves at Zouérat. That route still exists today in largely its original state, with the exception of the tunnel. Image: Ammar Hassan via Atlas Obscura The easiest route required running a short section of track through the then-Spanish controlled Western Sahara , but rather than pay Spain for the land and other concessions, the French engineers instead chose to tunnel under a hill sp
Read more

Railroad Vocabulary: A List of Words and Phrases Used in the Industry - Updated February 2024

Image
As somebody who enjoyed watching trains, but was not an employee of the railroad industry ( at least growing up ), when I would interact with railfans and historians, there was often a lot of technical jargon that applied only to the railroad industry thrown back and forth that made it difficult for a newcomer to understand what they were talking about. For example, what is a dinky? It's actually a passenger train. This non-inclusive language seems to keep the loop closed to members of the community, and to uncouple (no pun intended) that technical jargon and help make it easier for people to communicate with people in the industry, I am creating a list of railroad vocabulary that I'm hoping will make the industry more transparent.  BNSF 2361 . Image: Matt Flores While I ultimately believe that such technical jargon has no place outside of perhaps technical communications between employees, I know quite well that I alone am not going to stop people from communicating in a non-i
Read more

We asked ChatGPT to write an article on Abandoned Railroads - Here's the Result

Image
We live in an incredibly interesting age of information - made even more interesting by one of the most advanced chatbots that exist. Chatbots have been around for awhile now, but there are very few that have captured the amount of information and artificial intelligence that have been shown by ChatGPT . To demonstrate this, I asked it to write me an article on abandoned railroads with 1200 words in it. After this paragraph, you'll see what ChatGPT wrote. I will provide relevant links in its paragraphs and make any errors that I can see in brackets "[]". What I've noticed is that ChatGPT is great when it comes to general ideas about a particular historical topic, but largely gets facts, dates, and context wrong. Thus, we're still a little ways away from being taken over by computer overlords . Otherwise, thanks as always for reading my material, the rest is by guest blogger ChatGPT! Abandoned railroads are railways that are no longer in use or service. This can ha
Read more