(erielack) Re: Fw: DL&W Depot Johnson City, NY 1965

[WSmith5957_@_aol.com]

Doug,
             Neat foto of the DL&W Johnson City station. If memory serves me 
correctly, the station was on the East side of the tracks so this view would 
be looking West toward Vestal. In the early 60s, there was a roustabout 
called the 'over the river' job that worked Johnson City, the power plant, 
and on to Vestal. We'd leave the Conklin DL&W yard in the afternoon with 15 
or 20 cars & a GP9 or maybe an Alco switcher and run the former DL&W mainline 
past West BD where the ERIE & DL&W lines parted company. At that point, we'd 
begin switching industries - maybe sometihing for EJ shoe Co. then on to the 
Johnson City station area where there was a small cluster of industries - one 
of them sticks in my mind, a manufacturer of caramels. Cars for him were 
known as the 'candy man cars', thence to the power plant near the DL&W bridge 
over the Susquehanna river, always good for a few hopper cars although the 
Company lost that business due to poor service (in an 'economy' measure, the 
yardmaster cutoff a yard job and had us switch the yard for hours - sometimes 
the full shift - and the coal didn't get to the powerplant when they needed 
it. Niagra Mohawk decided to TRUCK the coal in so they wouldn't have to shut 
down. Whatever money this saved the RR, it lost them another customer. Hey, 
10 cars here, 10 cars there & now you have a whole train you've eliminated.
      As an official told me,'We have to be cost effective'. They were and 
now there's no more Erie-Lackawanna.
Regards,
Walter E. Smith

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