Greendell (DL&W station)

Coordinates: 40°58′31″N 74°49′08″W / 40.975305°N 74.818920°W

Greendell Station (foreground) and tower (background) in 1988, four years after the tracks were removed on the line. The shot looks eastbound towards the Pequest Fill.

Greendell Station is one of three original stations on the Lackawanna Cut-Off in northwestern New Jersey. Initially called Greensville, the station was located at milepost 57.6 in Green Township. The first revenue train to stop here was on December 24, 1911. The station and tower opened the day before the Cut-Off opened. Contractor Walter H. Gahagan built both the station building and ("GD") tower. (GD were the telegraph call letters of the tower.) Legend has it that the new facilities at Greensville didn't receive electricity immediately after the inauguration of service since it wasn't available in the area. The name of the station was changed to Greendell in October 1916. As time went on, the modest passenger patronage at Greendell relegated the station stop to flag stop status, with most trains skipping the station and stopping at Blairstown Station on the Cut-Off instead. The tower was closed either on January 8, 1932 or March 10, 1935 (company records are conflicting on this point), with the functionality of the tower being transferred to Port Morris Tower.^[1] The station closed in 1938.^[2] Greendell, however, would continue to serve freight customers right up to the very end of rail service on the Cut-Off.

The fact that the Lackawanna was the second railroad to establish rail service in Green Township (the Lehigh & Hudson River Railway was the first some 30 years earlier) meant that the two railroads divided up the local freight business, much of it related to farming and agriculture. When the Lackawanna built the Cut-Off, it must have anticipated that Greendell would play a major functional role in the operation of the railroad, given that a passing siding (with signal tower) for the double-track railroad was built there. Being approximately midway between Slateford Junction and Port Morris Junction, and a few miles east of the ruling grade on the Cut-Off, it was expected that slow freights would take the siding and wait at Greendell, enabling faster trains to overtake them.

But the downturn in business during the 1930s would lead to the abandonment of Greendell Tower and the passenger station as cost-saving measures. In anticipation of the 1960 merger with the Erie Railroad, the Lackawanna single-tracked the Cut-Off in 1958. Still wishing to keep some operational flexibility, the Lackawanna retained a somewhat elaborate four-mile (6.4 km) long passing siding at Greendell, with multiple switching points. This set-up remained in effect until the mid-1960s when as fewer and fewer trains were being run over the Cut-Off by the Erie Lackawanna, Greendell Siding was cut back to about 1.5 miles (2.4 km), about the length of the longest freight trains being run at the time. Although the 1970s would bring about a revival of freight traffic on the Cut-Off (all passenger service ended in 1970), Greendell Siding was not altered and remained unchanged until Conrail ended rail service on the Cut-Off in late 1978. Somewhat ironically, the final freight shipment to a customer on the Cut-Off was delivered by Conrail to Greendell. The tracks were removed from the Cut-Off by Conrail in 1984.

The station building and interlocking tower are currently in a state of disrepair. However, the Lackawanna Cutoff Historical Committee, a New Jersey-based historical group, is in the process of fund-raising for the restoration of the station building and surrounding site.

Greendell Station as seen in May 2015.

As NJ Transit investigates the resumption of rail service on the Cut-Off, Greendell has been proposed as the location of a maintenance facility for the line when rail service is extended into Pennsylvania. At present, NJ Transit rail service from Andover to New York City is projected to start in 2018.

References

1. Lackawanna's Silent Sentinels - Their Concrete Towers, by Bob Bahrs; Flags, Diamonds and Statues, Vol 21, No. 2 (April 2012)
2. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in the Twentieth Century (Volume 1), Thomas T. Taber III, Lycoming Printing Company, 1980.