Boonton Branch

The Boonton Branch refers to the railroad line that was completed in 1870 and ran 34 miles (54.8 km) from Hoboken, NJ to Denville, NJ as part of the Morris & Essex Railroad, which in turn was part of the Lackawanna Railroad. Although the branch hosted a number of commuter trains (and to a lesser extent, passenger trains) over the years, the line was primarily built as a freight bypass line. The term "branch" is somewhat of a misnomer since the Boonton Branch was built to a higher standard than the mainline, the Morristown Line, that it bypassed. As a result, technically speaking, the Boonton Branch was more of a "cut-off" than a branch, but "Boonton Branch" was the title the Lackawanna chose to give it. Some of the towns that the Boonton Branch passed through included Lyndhurst, NJ, Passaic, NJ, Clifton, NJ, Paterson, NJ, Wayne, NJ, Lincoln Park, NJ and, of course, Boonton, NJ.

Construction

It can be said that the Boonton Branch was built by anthracite coal. Indeed, by the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the management of the Morris & Essex Railroad recognized that the Morristown Line was inadequate as a freight line. Freight trains were inherently longer and slower—but also much more lucrative—than passenger and commuter trains. As a result, it was determined that a freight line was needed to bypass the steep grades and dense traffic of the Morristown Line.

That anthracite coal would play a major role in creating a need for the Boonton Branch is hardly a surprise, as the Lackawanna was known as the Road of Anthracite because it tapped the anthracite-rich hills of the Scranton, PA Valley to supply anthracite-hungry suburbs of New Jersey. As the Morristown Line served some of the most affluent towns in New Jersey, if not the United States, pushing the heavy freights off onto a new, bypass line was an easy decision, even for the notoriously frugal Morris & Essex Railroad.

The Boonton Branch was built between 1869-70. Reportedly, very few construction problems were encountered. The line more or less paralled the Morris Canal for its entire length. This was hardly a coincidence for competitive and topographical reasons. From a competitive point of view, the canal still carried a significant amount of coal traffic at the time the Boonton Branch was built. That situation would rapidly change as the railroad's delivery schedule was counted in hours—not days (as was the case of the canal)—and the railroad didn't freeze over for four months out of the year, at the time when its more profitable commodity was in greatest demand. From a topographical point of view, the Boonton Branch's alignment allowed for high-speed freight service, particularly eastbound, over a line that was relatively uncongested by commuter and passenger traffic. Westbound, trains had to overcome a ruling grade of 1%, which often required pusher engines and helper engines. Even so, the Boonton Branch's grade profile was a decided improvement over the Morristown Line's 1.5% ruling grade westbound to Summit, NJ.

Severing

After the merger of the Lackawanna Railroad with the Erie Railroad in 1960, the Erie Lackawanna Railroad's management began looking for ways to eliminate redundant parallel trackage. This was a major issue between Binghamton, NY and Elmira, NY, a distance of about 60 miles (96.8 km), where the railroads' two mainlines were often a stone's throw from each other. In New Jersey, however, the former Erie and Lackawanna lines, for the most part, served completely different markets, which made consolidation or elimination difficult. Yet, the E-L, which by 1962 was in a cash-strapped situation, desperately looked for extra money wherever it could find it. And find it it did, from the New Jersey Highway Department (now NJDOT). In that year, a perfect storm of events occurred where the highway department was acquiring right-of-way for Interstate 80 and itself coveted the Boonton Branch's alignment around Garret Mountain in Paterson, NJ. Initially, the highway department approached E-L management with an offer for the railroad to retain one track through the area. The line was double-tracked at that point.

However, the E-L management determined that the Boonton Branch was dispensable as a through route, particularly since most of the railroad's freight had been shifted off of the former Boonton Branch, and that the Erie's Greenwood Lake Branch could be used to create a new Boonton Line for commuter purposes. On paper this seemed like a reasonable solution, especially since the state of New Jersey was willing to pay handsomely for the severed piece of railroad. In theory, only the City of Paterson was affected by the change, with the closing of the former Lackawanna passenger station, although Paterson was already served by the former Erie mainline and did not protest the move.

Within a decade, however, the severing of the line at Garret Mountain would come back to haunt the E-L when the railroad shifted virtually all long-haul freights back to the "Lackawanna side". The aforementioned Greenwood Lake Branch had a grade profile similar to that of the Morristown Line, a line which the Morris & Essex Railroad's management had decided to bypass a century earlier. The "haunting" continued after the E-L became part of Conrail in 1976, as Conrail specifically would point to the severing of the Garret Mountain section of the Boonton Branch as a key reason in its decision to abandon the entire former E-L freight lines.

See also

• Sussex Branch

Sources

• The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Nineteenth Century (1 volume) and The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad in the Twentieth Century (2 volumes) by Thomas Townsend Taber III, Lycoming Printing Company, 1980.