How busy was the Southern Tier in the 1970s?

When I went to work for the EL in '68, there were 2-4 trains a day from Port Jervis to Maybrook. Once the PC merger happened, that traffic was diverted and steadily declined, until the time of the Poughkeesie Bridge fire, down to one train a day. That effectively made the yard at Port Jervis basically redundent for any type of frieght classification use, and turned it into nothing more than a crew change point, and terminal for the passenger trains.
As previously mentioned, in the 60's on weekends the commuter power was gathered from both Waldwick and Suffern on Friday nights, and taken to Croxton, where it would be put on westbounds to Port Jervis, allowing the big road power to turn at PJ and head back west from there. Once in PJ, the commuter engines would also be used to do the Maybrook turns, and then sent back east with trains to Croxton in time to be serviced for the commuter assignments on Monday morning. When power was really short, a crew would be called on Friday night to start at Waldwick to put all the power together, then pick up more power at Suffern, and go directly to PJ, enabling the railroad to get 1 1/2 or 2 turns between PJ and Croxton over the weekends. The railroad got the most out of what they had during that time.

Scot,

Not to be a pain in the butt, but I have a few books that shows one of the tracks with ties minus the rail in the 1970's... This was between Binghamton Suffern...And I quote "On Oct 14 1973 the process of removing track 2 through Kirkwood is more evident"

isak -

I strongly recommend that you not start poking around the rest of John's railroad pages unless you have a few days to spend -- for starters!

http://www.jon-n-bevliles.net/RAILROAD/index.html

That's a fantastic link....a bunch of great historical articles and info....MUCH THANKS !