I lived about a mile from the Lackawanna station on Parish Drive in Mountain View. Our family had a friend who lived in Union City. He worked at the Holland-American Pier and he would visit us on weekends traveling to Mountain View via the Lackawanna. Early in my years I remember sitting on the baggage cart at the station with my father waiting for the train. At that time I thought that all passenger trains were pulled by steam and freights were pulled by diesels. I remember one freight led by Lackawanna F's in their bright freight paint scheme rushing by with the engineer sounding his honker horn as I waved at him. Following the freight was the Pacific powered local with the family friend. This guy started bringing me timetables and I got hooked on train watching. Mountain View was an interesting place to view trains. I got my perspective of the Erie and Lackawanna from their appearance in the town. On the opposite side of the town on Greenwood Ave, now Erie Ave. Both streets named after the railroad: Erie and New York and Greenwood Lake. The Erie station was wood, with pealing paint with a big pot stove in the waiting room. It looked old but the station was actually newer than the concrete Lackawanna structure with a tile hip roof and steam heat fuel oil fed heating system. The Lackawanna with its two tracks, colored light block signals, and the well lit station platform at night, and solid looking station looked more impressive. The color of their engines added to that impression. From about age 4 to 8 my aunt and mother would take me to New York each Christmas season on one of the Boonton Line commuter trains. I always looked forward to that trip, first powered by steam and then diesel. Being in a train pulled by a Trainmaster was an experience. You could hear that engine roar five cars back. I thoroughly enjoyed riding in the old Boonton cars. Those things were built to last, and so many of them have to this day. The Stillwells always seemed like junk to me. They rattled more, didn't have the solid feeling of the Boonton cars. At night the Stillwells seemed dark compared to the lighting and brighter colors in the Boonton cars. In the late 50s I would spend mid-mornings and mid afternoons at the station watching the mailman exchange bags with the Hoboken-Washington train and the east bound from Branchville. Just as my interest in trains increased, the Lackawanna began to take off-peak trains off the Boonton Line. There was less and less to watch followed by the deterioration of the plant. First the agent was pulled from Mountain View. Next one of the major windows was boarded up. After that the westbound track was taken out of service. After the merger, the rest of the windows at the Parish Drive station were boarded up followed by the switch over to the Greenwood Lake line with the abandonment of trackage around the High Bridge area. This was all very difficult to take. So much was said of the Boonton Line being one of the finest engineered pieces of roadbed in the country and it was destroyed. I'm sure a lot of railroaders regret what happened to this piece of trackage. Ed Montgomery The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List Sponsored by the ELH&TS http://www.elhts.org To Unsubscribe: http://lists.elhts.org/erielackunsub.html ------------------------------
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