Erie Railroad Overview

Adam Burns collection via American-Rails

A 1960 map

Historic Bridges

Marc Scotti provides the following area railroad history (in reference to the railroad line that is a few feet from this bridge)

The railroad in the picture is the Southern Tier Line across New York State (the same line that crosses the famous trestle (now an arch bridge) in Letchworth Park in western New York).  I believe it was originally a way for NYS To give something to the communities across the southern tier of the state, because the Erie Canal went across the northern portion.|

It was originally the Erie Railroad (New York Lake Erie, & Western).  Portions of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western ran right next to it west of Binghamton.  Eventually the parallel lines could not both be sustained, so they merged to become the Erie-Lackawanna. Hurricane Agnes in 1972 destroyed large sections of the line, and the E-L soon went bankrupt.  So then the line was offered to the Chessie system (now part of CSX) by the government to provide token competition to the government creation called Conrail, which merged six other bankrupt railroads in 1976.

Conrail didn't care about the line, because they were also given both the New York Central and Pennsylvania main lines, which ran parallel to this line.  Conrail ran a token train or two, but never did anything more than to prevent someone else from owning it and competing with them. The Susquehanna also had trackage rights to connect their divisions in NJ and NY.

Once the feds put Conrail up for sale, CSX & Norfolk Southern carved it up, with Norfolk Southern getting this line and the Pennsylvania main line. So again, the line's owner had a much more important route nearby.  So they don't run anything east of Binghamton, and leased that portion out to the Central New York Railroad who still has the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway run a train or two a day over it to connect their lines in NY and NJ.  The Susquehanna and the Central New York Railroad are both part of Delaware-Otsego Corp., which was split up 40% CSX-40% NS-20% to the owner (Walter Rich) as a bribe to get NYS to approve the Conrail transaction while keeping the Susquehanna from being completely cut out after their piggyback traffic to north jersey would be taken by the big boys.

So, the actual engines you'll see are the Susquehanna's yellow-jackets.  But when they need more power, they lease an engine or two from each of their owners, and I actually saw all three coupled together once.