I have spent the better part of several days reviewing this manuscript. It represents a huge amount of research and work and I appreciate the interesting results of all this work. I do have some comments which I hope will help and maybe add a little bit of insight to this wonderful piece of work. To add to my interest in this topic, I have one dispatcher's train sheet in my collection and it is from the New York, Ontario and Western for just about three months previous to the last day, the sheet that I have is dated December 27, 1956. Mine also shows no movements to Scranton but it does show a move to Diamond which is about 9/10 mile from Scranton. With regard to the questions: 1. I did not try to figure this one out. 2. WN-9 must have been a turn job from Middletown to Weehawken and return. 3. I have no answer. 4. I could comment on this but it would not add anything worthwhile so I will let it ride as is, I think I know the reason. 5. I agree with the answer, probably a check of the tunnel. 6. I can't add to the story here but in the period of diesel operation it was not a all uncommon for one engine to cover two different assignments in a day. 7. I can't add anything here either. 8. I suspect the two engineers might have swapped jobs on this particular day, many years ago I have seen a lot of examples of engineers, firemen, conductors and trainmen swapping jobs for one reason or another. In the 50's and 60 and into the 70's the practice was against the rules but the railroad generally looked the other way as long as nothing happened. 9. This is a good question, maybe they had a road foreman and another official take a yard engine up the line to bring back these cars to Middletown if indeed they existed at all. 10. I agree with the comments here. 11. I don't have the information mentioned. 12. Good question. 13. This is an interesting question. I wonder why they had to re-crew the job in the first place, it was pretty obvious both from reading this but from the sheet that I have that both the engine crews and the train crews ran through between Norwich and Middletown which was a distance of 147.6 miles which was certainally easily accomplished within the 16 hours that crews were permitted to work in 1957 and other trains were run between these two points with a single crew. The only things I can think of is maybe because they ran it as an extra their agrements called for Cadosia being a division point or maybe one or more crew members were on short time.
The comment of 5:50 AM is confusing to me, "Operations south of Mayfield Yard closed out" this conflicts with the timetable direction in the last employee timetable put out in 1954, the timetable direction from Cadosia to Mayfield and Scranton was north even though the compass direction was south. This was not the only example in the railroad industry where trains went in a different compass direction than timetable direction.
There were no meets probably because for the most part all of the remaining trains on this last day were headed for Middletown. The only exceptions were the two trains out of Norwich to Oneida and Rome, the two trains out of Middletown to Kingston and Monticello, the train out of Cadosia to Walton and Delhi and finally the Oswego Turn out of Norwich. Every other train was headed to Middletown with all remaining engines, cars and company equipment that could be moved probably. If you had been along the tracks on this very last day you would have seen a decent number of trains for a railroad on its last legs, there were four trains during that day from Cadosia to Middletown southbound with two additional out of Summitville (the 2 locals). There were 2 southbounds out of Norwich as well.
Let me go back three months to December 27, 1956 and although I did not do nearly as much work as was done for March 27, 1957 the information is quite interesting, incidentally December 27, 1956 was a Thursday so I would think it might have been a normal typical weekday for the most part. There was a reasonable number of trains considering the traffic they had to move although none of them exceeded 50 cars total that day. 1 round trip Middletown - Weehawken (1 F-3 for power and very short trains both directions), 2 round trips Maybrook - Mayfield (one with 802 and the other with 601), 1 round trip Mayfield - Norwich (802 and 807) and one additonal train to Cadosia and Middletown with 601. Norwich - Oswego round trip turn with 804. This represented the road through freights with road power. For locals they ran a Middletown - Cornwall turn with 113, a Middletown - Fallsburg turn with 123, a Cadosia - Walton - Delhi Branch local with 119, Two locals out of Norwich to Clinton, one to Utica with 115 and one to Rome with 129, Two jobs between Fulton and Arrowhead with 124 and 117 (note Arrowhead was 2.78 miles from Fulton on a section of the O & W that is still in regular use by CSX) and finally a bunch of stuff working around Mayfield which I did not try to figure out, some of the moves were by the same engine and crew. They also had some sort of a problem around Summitville because there was a wrecker in that area with engine 121. This leaves the Monticello and Kingston Branches out of Summitville and on this particular day no trains were operated on either one of these branches.
This leaves one unusual move that took place on the O & W well after the last trains operated and that was the movement of 9 of the NW-2's from Middletwon to Kingston for delivery to the New York Central. A question could be asked why Kingston when Campbell Hall and Cornwall were much closer? I think probably the reason for Kingston was that the Wallkill Valley Branch between Montgomery and Kingston had a high bridge at Rosendale which some engines were restricted because of weight and they probably did not want to fiddle with trying to move nine switchers across that structure coupled, to separate them would have taken a lot of time while people walked back and forth across that bridge and the Cornwall connection was at CN Tower which was abandoned and removed from service very soon after the end of O & W operations so an interchange move there would probably not be possible without a lot of work for just the one move. This left Kingston as a logical choice for this interchange. I wonder what they used for a crew on this move as the O & W had laid off virtually all of their people, maybe they had one official left who could run a locomotive on the road. Pictures of this move appeared in various publications so we know the move got made. This might have been the very last move with O & W engines on O & W track.
One final comment, working with a dispatcher's train sheet is difficult, one does not understand some of the marks and stuff and some of the writing is less than good. Again, thank you very much for a job WELL DONE!!!!!
Noel Weaver
Last edited by Noel Weaver on Fri Apr 06, 2012 8:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.
