Vintage Delaware and Hudson Railroad Map
Vintage Delaware and Hudson Railroad Map
The Delaware and Hudson Railroad name originates from the 1823 New York state corporation charter listing the unusual name of “The President, Managers and Company of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Co.” authorizing an establishment of “water communication” between the Delaware River and the Hudson River.
The Delaware and Hudson Railroad was one of (if not) the longest operating Class I railroads in American history. While in independent operation the railroad was well managed. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, D&H President L.F. Loree ordered many of the railway’s larger locomotives to be taken off the mainline and serviced with the sole reasoning being to keep men working so they didn’t lose their jobs. Most of these engines were in excellent condition and didn’t need repairs. Also, in 1939, the railroad experimented with welded rail before many other railroads.
By the 1790s, industrializing eastern population centers were having increasing troubles getting charcoal to fuel their growing kilns, smithies, and foundries. As local timber was denuded efforts to find an alternative energy source began. During a fuel shortage in Philadelphia during the War of 1812 an employee by the direction of industrialist Josiah White conducted a series of experiments and discovered a number of ways that ‘rock coal’ or Anthracite could be successfully ignited and burned. The fuel theretofore, had been seen more as a way to put out a fire, than a fuel to build one up, so its use also had to overcome a lot of prejudice, White and his partner Erskine Hazard would found the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, creating the Lehigh Canal, and inspiring the exploitation of the anthracite deposits found by William Wurts around Carbondale, Pennsylvania which lead to the development of Scranton. The Mills of White and Hazard, and the regular large boatloads they proved they could supply had tipped the prejudice against Anthracite to wary neutrality in Philadelphia by 1822-1824 when the Lehigh was much damaged by flooding. The news of its rapid repair and restoration together with the fact anthracite stocks had for a time run down, but not out establishing the reliable sourcing finished off the bias, as did the beginning of mine output reaching the Delaware basin markets due to the long delayed completion of the Schuylkill Canal
Wurts was a large thinker, and inspired his brothers to back forming a company to deliver the new High Tech fuel, Anthracite to New York City by building an ambitious canal to connect the Hudson River and the Delaware River, and both to the coaldale coal deposits by chartering a Pennsylvania subsidiary corporation. the Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad to bring coal to the Delaware and the new canal. This cable railroad would grow in importance and become the far flung class I railroad, the Delaware and Hudson Railway.
