Lackawanna Cutoff Passenger Service Restoration

JohnFromJersey wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:32 pm

pateljones wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 9:36 am I did not refer nor infer daylighting. I hearing NJT May rebid in hopes of getting lower price bids for the current project. It did not anticipate such high bids in its budget.

What a bureaucratic mess. This area really sucks for getting mega projects going

Oh please.

Would you prefer we do it the Chinese way where the government does whatever it wants without any respect for personal property rights or environmental impacts?

Or should NJT have picked the highest bid it received, pricing be damned, just so some railfans can relive the “glory” of a line they barely got to ride in the past? But then we’d be hearing about how wasteful NJT is with our tax dollars!

If the project was such a slam dunk, it would have been done years ago. But hey, NJT is paying for the bulk of portal replacement, so maybe they can string this along long enough for Amtrak to take over and foot the bill for it.

pateljones wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 9:36 am ... I hearing NJT May rebid in hopes of getting lower price bids for the current project. It did not anticipate such high bids in its budget.

Not a surprise. The public bidding I oversee for a local county government has been coming in 20-30% higher than our engineer's estimates. Steel prices are high due to lack of supply. Other commodities have followed.

Should note project schedules have also gotten delayed in the last two years due to lack supplies and lack of employees, either through illness or labor shortages

lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:23 am Or should NJT have picked the highest bid it received, pricing be damned, just so some railfans can relive the “glory” of a line they barely got to ride in the past?

I think in order to have experienced the Cutoff by daylight, one would have to be in the 70+yo age range.

Miss Phoebe was gone by end of '66, and the Lake Cities - gone shortly before A-Day - X'd during darkness (OK; dusk WB).

My Ill-fated '65 joyride noted earlier was to X Tunkhannock by daylight, which I never got to do - well in this lifetime.

Gilbert B Norman wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 10:02 am My Ill-fated '65 joyride noted earlier was to X Tunkhannock by daylight, which I never got to do - well in this lifetime.

Only the Phoebe still did in 1965, all others were evening or overnight. Blairstown still had three trains in each
direction as of May 1965.

Greendell and Johnsonburg were long gone.

lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:23 am Oh please.

Would you prefer we do it the Chinese way where the government does whatever it wants without any respect for personal property rights or environmental impacts?

If the ROW is still in tact and/or most of the rails are still in place (don't think either is the case here), then yes, the state/organization reactivating a rail line should just be able to steam through it since there should be no complications. It's not starting a new route, technically, vs. say bulldozing a village in China to put a new rail bridge in

Gilbert, sadly all those who rode a long distance EL train will be gone by the time a commuter or Amtrak train ever gets to Scranton. It's like your Moses, never to make it out of the desert and that makes me sad.

Might I say, I had intended on that Dec '61 trip home to NY from Champaign, when after visiting my GF in Cedar Rapids (she, or her family, wanted her to have the small Liberal Arts College at Coe located there), I took MILW #20, The Arrow, which was never late - until this day it was!!

The mad dash X the Loop from CUS to La Salle "wasn't enough" as I watched "photo finish" NKP #6 pull away, so they put me on EL #2 Erie Limited (why I was so worried about saving my Father $20 when I could have gone over to La Salle and been on the Century escapes me).

All told, I never got to see Tunkhannock by daylight.

Never mind, when I showed up late for an Xmas party in NY, I had to listen to "why can't you just fly like everyone else does"?

Like airplanes back then, or now, were never late!

JohnFromJersey wrote: ↑Wed Feb 09, 2022 2:18 am

lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:23 am Oh please.

Would you prefer we do it the Chinese way where the government does whatever it wants without any respect for personal property rights or environmental impacts?

If the ROW is still in tact and/or most of the rails are still in place (don't think either is the case here), then yes, the state/organization reactivating a rail line should just be able to steam through it since there should be no complications. It's not starting a new route, technically, vs. say bulldozing a village in China to put a new rail bridge in

Just because the rails are there doesn't mean that nature hasn't taken over. Plus wildlife that wasn't on the endangered list when the line was built (perhaps because no such thing even existed back then) but is now absolutely gets priority for preservation vs. some unbounded desire to see trains running again.

Never mind the emissions coming from the trains themselves once they do run.

Tier 4 locos don't emit a whole lot of pollutants, supposedly. Of course, if you reopen a line using old junkers, different story.

lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:23 am Would you prefer we do it the Chinese way where the government does whatever it wants without any respect for personal property rights or environmental impacts?

Yes.

https://youtu.be/vH7HUOODSW0

With apologies to Al Jolson, is he "waiting for the good ship Robert E Lee"

The Robert E Lee has a better chance of reincarnating than the chance of Scranton passenger service reappearing in my lifetime. But I did ride the Cutoff in Lackawanna and EL days so even if a contract to restore the Cutoff were to be signed tomorrow, I might not be around for its completion. The original Cutoff took 3 years to build. How long do you think the restoration would take, even though most of the grading, etc seems intact? How about the improvement of the railroad between Slateford. and Scranton? Note that the original IRT, which went from City Hall to Grand Central, then across 42 st, then up Broadway to 145 st, took 4 years to build, including what was then the world's largest power plant and the first all-steel railroad cars. Cost was $35 million. Certainly seems that the increased cost of public works has greatly exceeded the general rate of inflation. Note that most of that subway was 4 tracks. New York's most recent subway expansion, the 2nd ave subway, took more than 30 years to complete and so far has only 3 stations and 2 tracks. The plan there is to build another couple of stations in the next 10 or 20 years.

If you wanted to build a passenger service from NY to Scranton your best bet would probably be to restore the former Jersey Central to the Delaware River and then proceed to Allentown and Wilkes-Barre. Tracks are already there. In NJ the state already owns the Raritan Valley line. I don't know what the best route from Wilkes-Barre to Scranton is, but there are a few alternatives. And, Allentown is the third largest city in PA. And any track construction needed would be in relatively industrialized areas, so less chance of trouble from various flora and fauna.

Mr. Grossman, I went on a CNJ fan trip September 1960 to Scranton. This is where I first met the late Noel Weaver, who off and on, I stayed in contact with over almost the next fifty years.

The CNJ side of the Lehigh River is the East and that has since been chopped up. Therefore, any such routing would require use of Topper's "Leaky Valley" to Wilkes-Barre. Apparently, there remains someone's trackage in place "over the hill" from there to Scranton.

Maybe I might learn from the Nursing Home that a train has cut a ribbon at Andover; but this idea of returning passenger rail to Scranton using a 22 mile route that has been abandoned and returned to the "endangered ones" (this ain't the PRC over here where they "don't exactly worry" about those critters), then taking the remaining route and building FRA Class 4 from the existing Class 2 - all because POTUS46 was born there and somebody got handy with a pen in a "Coloring Book" - is up there with the "W-Gang's" Y2K "Coloring Book" they named Network Growth Strategy.