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RE: (erielack) Port Morris November 1963

Some operational comments concerning P Morris yard. Since it appears that it was aligned with the Old Road, a WB freight headed for the Cutoff but making a pickup at PM would have had to leave its train on the mainline, then head into the yard. Perhaps there were a couple of tracks further east where the yard switcher could pull the cut out of the yard and leave it for the through train. Which was it? This inconvenient alignment may explain why the yard was mostly abandoned in favor of Dover.

The June 1961 schedule shows a couple of EB's that took the Old Road as Walt mentions: the BH-12 I mentioned the other which terminated at PM, and the BH-8 which went on to Croxton or Hoboken. Both trains took between 7 and 8 hours to get from Scranton to PM, while all other EB's took around 4 hours or less. Old Road stops included Portland, of course, as well as Washington for P'burg cars and Wyandotte Chemical. Walt, do you recall any others? One interesting point about BH-8 is that running time from Scranton was 11:15. I'm pretty sure that the hours of service law had been shortened to 12 hours by then, so it would have been almost impossible for the crew to not expire. It appears from running times that all WB trains took the Cutoff.

Paul B

From: "Walter Smith" <wsmith5957_@_hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: (erielack) Port Morris November 1963

   Looking at these posts re: Port Morris yard reminds me of how lucky I was 
to see it in the final days........a small window of time when I worked in 
Scrtanton (1961-63) and occasionally caught the job that ran the old line 
terminatiing at Port Morris. I had a post about working that job a few years 
ago, but maybe u guys didn't see it. I didn't describe the whole thing ( 
having to go onto the old line at Slateford and switching the yard at 
Portland with 4 covered wagons) it was really a fun trip except that by the 
time we got to PM, you were really beat having been on duty since 7 PM the 
previous night.


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