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(erielack) Erie Lackawanna Day is also Memorial Day
Some of the recollections have been fun reading.
My fondest recalls of EL:
Little league games at Water Works Park almost a mile west of Dover, NJ, station along the main line in the early 1970s. The Saturday games would almost stop as the afternoon freight would go by, usually with two units. I was on the Henry O. Baker Insurance team, and we had one kid named Jerry Lycowski who we called "Mole." He was huge for his age, and much bigger and heavier than all of us 10-12 year olds. And he could hit, and often. He was our version of Babe Ruth; not the best behaved, but he made up for it by hitting balls higher and longer than anyone had ever seen. He would hit balls over the big brick-and-mortar Water Works Park sign in right-center field, and twice he was able to hit the ball onto the railroad tracks. I'd like to claim that I remember what the diesels were, but I don't. I do remember the gray and stripes and strings of boxcars. But the trains passing by as we played ball was an indelible part of that era for me.
Born in 1960, I lived through EL's entire existence near the top of Madison Street in Dover, which was above and looked over Crescent Field. The trees obscured the vew of the railroad, but we could hear a lot of the action on the EL. As kids we played ball games and ice skated all year in Crescent Field, the site of the DL&W's old watering pond in Dover, and saw a lot of trains as we played. I do recall one crew with a striped Geep switching gondolas in the freight yard, and they were scooting about and banging into cars -- I remember thinking that these guys were rougher with the real thing than I was with with the models in the basement.
My first recollection of Conrail happened shortly after merger day, when I walked through the Dover station breezeway from town to find a giant-looking Reading C630-something leading a PennCentral GP30-something on a long freight just sitting there in front of the tower -- the crew might have been in the tower. The Reading unit looked huge -- I'd seen nothing like it before. Yep, things were gonna change.
October 17th for me, though, is memorial day.
It is the last day of DL&W and its long and rich history. How many of you know that DL&W was the only railroad in the nine original companies that made up what would eventually become the Dow Jones Industrial Average listed in what would grow to become the Wall Street Journal?
It is also the last day of service on the Rockaway Loop. After getting home about 9:00 p.m. that on 10/17 this week I popped in the Mark I Lackawanna video that featured the moves of the 10/17/48 excursion over the line during dinner.
Mike Del Vecchio
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