Re: (erielack) Appropriate Lists for Occasional non-EL topics (wa s re:

[Hhaines_@_aol.com]

Paul and all,

I don't mind reading about such things.  Sometimes it brings back memories, 
and other times it reminds us of something to model lineside that may not 
have been an EL customer.  

For example, there was a pony ride for the longest time (well, 1950s or maybe 
just as I was growing up) between Passaic Jct and Plauderville just as 
Midland Ave crossed (to the south of) the Erie Bergen County Line (railroad 
east from Passaic Jct) from what is now Saddle Brook into East Paterson or 
almost Garfield.  (What is East Paterson called now, Elmwood Park?) 

Also in that cluster of rural suburbia was a Gulf station on the NE corner of 
Market St. and Midland Ave, and a grave stone company on the SE corner of 
Midland Ave and Market Street, but I could never make out whether it was an 
Erie customer even though it had a gondola looking thing and overhead crane 
at times.  

I know there was a local coal dealer along Midland Ave at one point, maybe in 
Garfield just past Plauderville where Midland Ave again crosses the Bergen 
County line.  A little farther down that line, near the end of Main in Lodi, 
is where my Mother, her parents, and my brother are buried--all a stone's 
throw away from the BC line.

Going north (railroad west) on the BC line from Coalberg Jct (Passaic Jct) 
across the Garden State Parkway, I recall that we'd pass GE's electronics 
repair shop (originally Robert Hall's clothes, then RCA's shop that moved 
from Paterson and they became GE), a grave yard, at one time a garden 
center-greenhouse truck farm vegetable stand (with what looked like an old RR 
reefer car for cool storage), Cloverdale Dairy (that crossed Midland Ave and 
has now become townhouses), (a non-RR customer) Bushel 'n a Peck/Texaco 
dealer across from STANDARD (Amoco), and farther north (in Fairlawn or East 
Paterson) a bleach distributor that was an Erie customer with a building 
that, from my memory, might be modeled from Walther's Cornerstone Miranda's 
Bananas.  

Some of this is just dots on the topo maps previously discussed on this list. 
 Some of those maps go back far enough to show that nothing was there but a 
canal or two, a swamp (that I remember seeing in one of Hal Carsten's old 
films of Erie shared at the 1987 ELHS meeting in Saddle Brook), and some of 
the roads like Midland Ave, Saddle River Road, the start of what became Phele 
Ave, and what later became Market Street to Paterson.

The actual sites and names are a bit confused because this is from a young 
memory with some research, rather than just research of what was printed, but 
they were all connected to watching Erie and EL trains some time in my 
life--and that was just a short stretch of mainline.

So, yes, non-customer right-of-way stuff or nearby stuff seems to fit this 
list content as Paul said.  Although I must confess, all the stuff coming out 
causes me to learn about things I would have never known--like a number of 
DLW items to a point of "how do I include that" on my Erie/NYSW layout.

H Haines
ELHS #1447
  

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