Owasco River Railway ?

I was doing some research on the Hojack line in Monroe County. According to property records on the county clerk's website, just about all of it was sold off to to private parties from the mid 80's to the mid 90's by the Owasco River Railway (reserving easements for utitilies of course).

Was the Owasco River Railway a paper railroad created to deal with former NYC and PC abandoned railroad properties? What purpose do they serve?

For a photo of a Shay that apparently was used on the Owasco River Railway, go to my "New York Central Collection," http://www.forecyte.com/nyccollection/ . There is a photo of No. 7189 at Auburn, NY in 1940. -- Richard Leonard

I found transfers from this line as well as the Unadilla Valley in the Gen Cty records. Many small parcels were packaged together and transferred to the above mentioned as quit claim deeds. They were then marketed by same with a much lower overhead(lower price lawyers). Any gain would be on the smaller corp books . This process left CR out of the paper chain, probably there was some tax advantage to this.

At the time I checked corp addresses and they all were located at the same address as CR in Phila.

The Owasco River Railway was jointly owned 50-50 by New York Central and Lehigh Valley.

The railroad properties they were selling were never conveyed to Conrail by Penn Central in 1976, so it was probably used as a corporate vehicle by the Penn Central Estate and its successors to sell surplus land.

Borntrager's book states the Owasco River RR was jointly owned by NYC and LV, and operated by NYC. The presence of a light bridge had mandated use of the Shay, and with costs very high it was here that a diesel was put into service, one of the first 2 diesels on the Rochester Division (the other being on the State Street branch in Rochester). This was supposedly a 70-ton unit built by Fairbanks Morse (according to the book) but it seems I recall discussion on one of the previous incarnations of this forum that it was something else....???

Chief Troll is exactly right - the paper entity of Owasco River RR was used as the recipient of Penn Central lines not transfered to Conrail. Subsequently the assets were sold to scrappers, short lines, etc, by Owasco River RR