Tom’s Raritan River
Railroad Page
www.RaritanRiver-RR.com
Lucius Beebe Published “HighBall – A Pageant of Trains” in 1945.
The first chapter is
almost entirely dedicated to the Raritan River Railroad.
Questions? Comments?
Click
on the pictures or the links to see full size pictures from the book!
Pictures
are at the end of the article
www.raritanriver-rr.com/LBeebe/P00.JPG
HIGHBALL
A PAGEANT
OF TRAINS
by
LUCIUS BEEBE
1945
THE year 1888, in the world and the United States in
general, and in and around New York City in particular, was freighted with
nervous excitements. The eastern seaboard had at length dug itself out of the
drifts occasioned by the great blizzard which will forever be known by the year
of its occurrence, and Chester Conklin had succumbed to pneumonia occasioned
by falling in a snowdrift during the record fall. The i\’Ietropolitan
Opera Company of New York, in an era when boiled shirts and diamond tiaras were
the outward and visible symbols not alone of respectability but also of social
achievement, was vastly concerned over whether or not to include German opera
in its season’s repertoire. The German Kaiser was annoyed with France and was
shaking a noisy saber in its scabbard.
The columns of the New York Daily Tribune were
occupied by advertisements for Jaeckel the furrier’s
latest importation, a “seal Parisian walking jacket,” and a patent nostrum
against pneumonia called Denison’s Plaster whose typeset read ominously:
“Paraded Saturday, Died Monday!” The West still maintained a profound hold upon
the public imagination and Century Magazine’s frontier article for November was
entitled “Looking for Camp.” Classified advertisements of coachmen and grooms
seeking employment occupied half a column of agate type in the New York Herald.
In the world of railroading, too, brave doings were
toward. A newly financed and organized road, the Ridgefleld
and New York Railroad Company, was laying track from Danbury, Connecticut, to
New York City with an eye, doubtless, to making the celebrated Danbury Fair as
well as the hat building resources of that city more immediately accessible to
Manhattan. Throughout New York state the car stove had
been forbidden by law in all passenger equipment, and railroad executives were
shaking dubious heads over the expense of installing steam pipes in the wooden,
open-platform rolling stock of their properties. The Pennsylvania announced a
five per cent dividend on its common stock, a half of one per cent less than in 1887, but
the market bore up bravely under the intelligence. In Chicago, the Lake Shore
and Michigan Southern Company was having sharp words with the Chicago and
Western Indiana and filed a bill to restrain the latter road from interfering
with the business of laying Lake Shore iron across the tracks of the C. &
W. I. to join the main line of the Rock Island at Chic~go
Heights.
And across the New Jersey meadows, from New Brunswick
to South Amboy, Irish graders and track gangs were laying the fills and light
iron for what promised to be much more than a mere connecting railroad if ever
the tracks of what was then as now known as the Raritan River Railroad should
extend far enough across the main line of the Pennsylvania to join at Bound
Brook with the far-reaching systems of the Lehigh Valley, the Baltimore and
Ohio, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Reading Company. Had this
ambitious plan been realized it is possible that the vast quantity of
industrial freight now syphoned out of South Amboy by
the Pennsylvania might have been diverted to other roads through the agency of
the Raritan River and the ambitious little project have ended as a through-haul
carrier in its own right. Legal and financial difficulties, however, limited
the Raritan River essentially to the trackage,
completed in 1890, between South Amboy and New Brunswick, with spurs to
Sayreville, Amclay, and the lead mines and docks that
lie adjacent to the Raritan River itself just around the bend to Perth Amboy
and the glistening reaches of Raritan Bay.
Time, however, has dealt more gently with the Raritan
than it has with many another short connecting line and today this little pike,
about twelve miles in length, operating without signals on telephonic dispatching
and with a motive power roster of only eight steam locomotives, is very much a
going concern and the last example of-big-time railroading and the grand manner
of the high iron in minuscule within easy distance of New York City. It is
standard-gage; its engines are more modern than many and many a valitudinarian kettle still in service along the mthn lines of the Wabash, C. & E. I., and Monon, and the sight of No. 5, a flange-stacked Baldwin
2-8-2 built in 1910, double-heading with No. i at the
head end of forty high cars and No. 7 pushing from behind as they breast the
grade of Bergen Hill is a picture to quicken the pulses and lift the
railroading heart. The morning mists of Raritan Bay are shivered with their
advance, the high stacks thunder with their exhaust, the coupled locomotives
roll and shudder perilously over the light iron, the heavy consist glides by,
the caboose and rear helper vanish again into the absorbent fog, and there has
come and gone a vision of railroading as true and authentic as any sight of the
Union Pacific’s ponderous Mallets fighting for life on Sherman Hill a few
miles~ west of Cheyenne.
The destinies of the Raritan are minor and homely
destinies involved with. brick kilns, coalyards and pie factories. A momentary touch of terror
and grandeur, perhaps, derives from the traffic stemming from the vast du Pont-Hercules explosive manufactury
at Parlin and another du
Pont subsidiary which manufactures cinema films hard by, and for these perilous
chores No. ii has had its stack fitted with an eye-filling spark arrester. But
mostly the road’s business is with lumberyards, pigmented clays, and the
delivery of tank cars to the Texas Company at Milltown. The Raritan’s last
passenger revenue, in the sum of $92, was earned in 1938. It once carried some
9,000 commuters weekly in its passenger and mixed~ trains, and handsome stone
and brick stations at Parlin and New Brunswick
testify to its prosperity as a passenger road only a few years ago. Today the
station at Parlin houses an orderly and well-staffed
freight bureau and business office. The sightly
little depot at the New Brunswick terminal has closed its waiting room and
boarded up its open fireplace, but its freight house is in good repair, and in
the station agent’s office a battery of telephones, filing cases, and
calendars, torn to the current month, from the Minneapolis & St. Louis
Railroad show it to be a going concern.
Very much as is the scheme of things on the West Shore
branch of the New York Central, where all westbound traffic is dispatched by
day and trains headed for New York run by night, the local freights of the
Raritan set out from South Amboy, where they have been made up during the night
in the classification yards of the New York and Long Branch and the Pennsylvania,
and roll westward during the morning hours. In the late afternoon the train
crews pick up eastbound cars from New Brunswick, Milltown, South River, Vandeventer; Gillespie, and Parlin,
from Sayreville Junction and Phoenix, and rest for the night in the home
roundhouse at South Amboy. No. 5 is the oldest engine in continuous service on
the Raritan and was the second No. 5 on its roster. The first No. 5, however,
is merely a legend, shrouded in mystery. All that anyone remembers is that it
was a 4-4-0 American type locomotive— quite the lady, but her origins and her
end are obscure. Just how a full-size steam locomotive could disappear or be
scrapped without a trace and leave behind it no record of its going on the
company books baffles H. Filskov, chief operations
officer, but that’s all anybody knows nowadays. Its most modern motive power is
No. 7, an o-6-o switcher built by Baldwin in 1919 and purchased by the Raritan
from the Chattahoochee Valley a few years later. Altogether the Raritan has stabled
twenty-one steamers in its roundhouse since 1890 and nowadays it makes a
practice of keeping seven engines in daily operation and one in the back shops
at all times.
The right-of-way of the little road, for the most
part, is over New Jersey meadows and fresh ponds and inlets from the tidal
reaches of the Raritan River. There is a stiff grade through a lonely woodland
cut, in fall thickly populated by hunters, just east of Milltown. Deserted
spurs and moldering factory premises testify that once this stretch was alive
with small industrial projects, gravel pits, manufactories, and agricultural
undertakings. At South River the single iron passes over desolate marshes and
spans a curving arm of water within sight of the domed spires of the town’s
Orthodox Russian Church. At Parlin there are comparatively
spacious switching yards, a water tower of ancient brick and wooden design, and
a protected grade crossing, while a few miles farther on, the line crosses the
tremendous sand pits and narrow-gage railroad system of a
cement and gravel works. At no time, save perhaps in the deep woods of
Milltown, are the train crews of the Raritan out of sight of the tall
smokestacks and factory sites of industry, but even so, the illusion persists
that it is primarily a country railroad, a rural enterprise serving the
necessities of suburban existence.
The Raritan is, of course, the result of many and
varied antecedent circumstances in the history of New Jersey railroading. The
region it serves is an old one, industrially speaking, and a century and more
ago the cargo boats and passenger packets from Philadelphia went up the Delaware
River to Trenton and so inland by way of the Delaware and Raritan Canal to
reach tidewater again at New Brunswick. This pattern was broken by the
construction of the storied Camden and Amboy Railroad, now a part of the
Pennsylvania system. A clue to the ownership and management of the Raritan
River Railroad may be found in the person of its chief officer and
vice-president who is George LeBoutillier, executive
of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but the Raritan is still proud in its own motive
power, its own herald on its shiny red, double-truck cabooses, and the legend
of its own separate and individual entity lettered in gold on the tenders of its
locomotives which buck and heave valiantly ahead of thirty- and forty-car
trains over its twelve miles of main-line iron. Any inquiry into the internal
economy of the Raritan River will disclose that it is financially profitable,
both as an individual enterprise and as an agency for the collection and
distribution of revenue freight for the Pennsylvania, whose South Amboy
extension meets the mighty mainline at that crossroads of the railroad world,
Monmouth Junction. But more than this it is a homely and familiar factor in the
daily lives of the communities it serves and one which no other agency of
transport is likely to supplant in the immediate future. Buses and private
motor cars have absorbed its passenger traffic, but it is improbable that
trucks can, with economy and profit, handle its not inconsiderable bulk of
lumber, sand, coal, and other non-perishable merchandise.
The Raritan River is the archetypal connecting
railroad, the dream railroad out of only yesterday. Its disintegrating ties,
sometimes laid in eccentric patterns, its archaically light rails and original
fluted fishplates laid down more than half a century ago, its hand operated
switches and homely informality of dispatching are redolent of wistful
railroading years, and it would surprise almost nobody if some morning No. 11
should come muttering down the grade from Phoenix with a bearded engineer in a
curly derby hat leaning out of the driver’s side. Its rolling stock (except its
brightly lacquered cabooses) bears the car heralds of other railroads; the
platforms of its passenger stations are peopled with commuting ghosts;
enthusiastic huntsmen have riddled the warning signs at its grade crossings.
But there is fire, metaphorically and factually, in its boilers; the main and
connecting rods clatter and are instinct with life; on the high (and only) iron
of the Raritan River there is traffic still. The Raritan River with its almost
irreducibly short mileage and well shopped stable of little locomotives is, to
be sure, only one of a multitude of short-haul railroads, each an individual
entity, a personality to the sentimental, a microcosm of the vast industry of
railroading to the more precise-minded.
by
LUCIUS BEEBE
1945
Pictures:
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Questions? Comments?
Other
Fine Sites Dedicated to the Raritan River Railroad
http://www.geocities.com/transit383/rrhist.html
http://jcrhs.org/raritanriver.html
Here is an entire forum dedicated to
discussions of the RRRR!
www.railroad-line.com/forum/forum.asp?forum_id=2