January 2001, Telegraphed Dispatch

Have you ever wandered over the spot where a forgotten little railroad once gashed the rocky slope or curved politely past a farmer's woodlot? Maybe you've picked up corroded spikes and a fishplate three-quarters of a century old in your rambles; maybe you've been one of the more fortunate explorers who can claim to have discovered faint traces of disintegrated stringers that once bore strap-iron rails. Whatever your luck, whether the remains of the abandoned lines consist of rusted rails like those of the Sterling Mountain Railroad in southern New York or more vague rights-of-way dating back to pioneer construction, a walk along the site of an old railroad always grips the imagination.

New York State has many such reminders of the past. Among the most unusual of these is the pike over whose right-of-way once ran two railroads, the first of which dates back more than a hundred and seventy years. On April 19, 1830, a year before the famous Dewitt Clinton puffed its way over the strap rails of the Mohawk & Hudson, the Canajoharie & Catskill Railroad was incorporated at Albany. The aim of its founders was to provide a logical short cut between the Hudson River's water-borne traffic and the growing communities of the Mohawk Valley.

The Canajorharie & Catskill obtained its charter from the New York legislature after a long and bitter fight. The project was violently opposed by the Albany interests, who feared competition with Clinton's Erie Canal. But when the bill was finally passed and the news brought to Catskill by stagecoach, it was acclaimed with great rejoicing.

The capital stock of the new railroad was to be $600,000. A subsequent act passed on April 18, 1838, authorized an issue of special certificates to the extent of $300,000, but this was in the bad days to come. The original charter provided among many other stipulations that the maximum speed of trains "is not to exceed 20 miles per hour and 5 miles per hour on crossings, and 15-minute stops are to be made at all stations."

In the silent dawn of Thursday, October 27, 1831, the citizens of Catskill were awakened by the booming roar of 13 cannon shots. An old copy of the program printed for the day shows how elaborately the occasion was celebrated. It was only the Breaking of Ground, but that meant a great deal to these people. The order of events included:

Thirteen guns at Sunrise

Procession will be formed at 11 A.M. in front of Catskill House

Procession will move at ringing of church bells to a lot west of Captain Allen's House where the Ceremony of Breaking Ground will be performed by the President

Order of Procession will be¾

Marshall, Gen. John C. Johnson, Assistant Marshall, Col. J. Olmstead

Military Contingent

Band of Music

Committee on Arrangements

Directors of the C & C Railroad

Engineers and Assistants

Contractors

Trustees of Catskill Village

Clergy and Sheriff

Citizens Generally

Fire Companies Nos. 2 and 3

The yellowed pamphlets containing the Engineer's Reports are mines of detailed information on surveys and construction methods, showing that the excitement of breaking ground was somewhat premature. It was several years before actual construction could begin. Grading was done by oxen, plows, and dump carts; and local saw mills, run by water power, cut 5 x 6-inch pine crossties, and the long timbers upon which 2-1/4 x 5/8-inch-thick strap-iron rails imported from England were affixed by handmade nails. The bridges were built of stone and rough-hewn timber. Eventually 27 miles of track was laid along the winding banks of Catskill Creek to the little hamlet of Cooksburg. This trackage, by the way, out did the Mohawk & Hudson by several miles. Work through the rugged country with its dense forests, numerous bridges, cuts and fills had proved slower and more expensive than was anticipated. But at last the men and women and children of the Hudson River village (with the exception of those few who had journeyed to Albany to see the Mohawk & Hudson's Dewitt Clinton) were to have their first sight of a locomotive.

Oddly enough, the local newspapers, The Messenger and the Catskill Recorder, gave no description of the amazing new power. For this we must turn to a rare book written in German by Franz Anton Von Gerstner, an Austrian engineer who came to this country in 1839 to make an intensive study of American railroads. He died about one and a half years after his arrival in the United States; his painstaking findings were not published until 1842 when his widow turned them over to a Vienna publisher. Only a few copies of the book remain, and from one of these Walter A. Lucas, an authority on locomotive history, has made a translation of Von Gerstner's remarks about the Canajoharie & Catskill Railroad.

Youth and age together. Remains of one of the stone viaducts along the Canajoharie & Catskill's winding track. Note the irregular matching of the blocks forming the voussoirs.

"The Canajoharie & Catskill," wrote Gerstner, "has one locomotive with its tender bought from H.R. Dunham & Co., New York, costing $6,300. She has cylinders 10-1/4 x 16 inches; drivers (a single pair) 4 feet 8 inches in diameter; weight, without water, 9-1/2 tons. The other rolling stock at the end of 1839 was one passenger car and ten freight cars. The greatest grade is 1 in 66 and the smallest curvature 400 feet."

Writing to the Catskill Recorder in his eightieth year, Walton Van Loan, author of A Guide to the Catskill Mountains described how in 1842 when a lad of eight, he rode on the Canajoharie & Catskill Railroad. "To help start the train, Hank Hibler had to attach his horse and cart to the engine. Rails would become unfastened and bend up into snakeheads which children would swing. Edward H. Broadhurst, who surveyed the road and lived at our house, stated that the maximum ascent was 723 feet, and on a stiff grade the passengers had to alight and push the cars."

Twenty miles had been graded by 1837 and in March of the same year, rails were laid over the first section and this stretch, extending to a point near Cairo, was put in operation. The first advertisement of service, printed in the Catskill Messenger, is headed by a woodcut depicting a high-stacked engine with a single pair of drivers hauling a car with a stagecoach body mounted on four wheels, and announces that "the cars will run to a point near Cairo to carry delegates to the Whig Convention." The next section was opened to Oak Hill. The engine finally puffed into Cooksburg, the northern end of construction, in 1839.Extracts from the treasurer's report of expenditures have been culled from an old scrapbook and reprinted by the Greene County Historical Association. Among them, we find such items as these:

May 13, 1841: $9.00 for wood fuel.

May 31, 1841: $18.47 to James Ecklor for

running the engine.

July 29, 1841: $10.00 for 4 wheel-barrows for

repairing the roadbed.

May 7, 1842: $7.22 for 8-1/4 days' work on track

by Dennis Lowney.

Ambitious plans were afoot to make the Catskill & Canajoharie Railroad a link in continuous communication between New England and "the far west" of New York State. The American Railroad Journal of August 1, 1938, stated that Ezra Hawley, a prominent Catskill industrialist, was urging a tie-up with the new railroads east of the Hudson. The purpose could be accomplished by operating a steam ferry the five miles between Catskill and Hudson. At the latter point, direct connection could be made with the Hudson & Berkshire Railroad, completed to West Stockbridge, Mass., in September of 1838. According to the Catskill Messenger of May 20, 1839, the Hudson & Berkshire was operating two trains each way between its terminals. The Hudson line, however, was soon absorbed by the Western Railroad, now the Boston & Albany, and through service was provided from Boston to Hudson in 1841. A year later, the Housatonic Railroad, building northward from Bridgeport, Conn., tapped the Hudson & Berkshire.

There was an alternate proposal to construct a railroad from Canajoharie southwestward to a connection with the Erie Railroad, but this plan, like the other, was never realized. The funds necessary to extend through to Canajoharie could not be raised. Freight traffic decreased. Freshets swept away trestles and the last train went through a wooden bridge between Durham and Oak Hill in 1842. The road was sold to the Catskill Bank for $11,000 and junked by Hiram Van Steenburg. The engine was converted to stationary power for hoisting ice at the old Catskill Point icehouse.

Charles L. Barker, an old resident of Catskill, saw the engine when he was a boy, before a fire destroyed it. The only reminders left of the C & C are moss-covered stone bridge arches near Oak Hill, and dim traces of cuts and fills.

Nearly a half a century after the Canajoharie & Catskill folded; its ghosts were rudely disturbed by another railroad that plunked its ties and steel right down on the ancient line's right-of-way. The Catskill Mountain Railway came into being in 1880. The original surveyors for the C & C had done such a good job that the new road followed the old grading to South Cairo, where it diverged westward on its own right-of-way to the foot of the mountains. Three iron bridges over the Catskill Creek occupied the sites of the Canjoharie's old wooden trestles.

This new pike was the brainchild of Charles L. Beach, who was elected its first president on September 16, 1880. In his younger days, Beach had re-organized and put on an efficient basis the stagecoach lines operated over the post road between New York and Albany. For many years he had owned the historic Catskill Mountain House, one of America's most famous resorts.

Access to this imposing place, with its white Grecian columns and unsurpassed view of four states from the mountaintops, was extremely difficult. A heavy summer tourist traffic came to Catskill by steamboat, then by the Hudson River Railroad and finally by the West Shore Railroad. But at Catskill the traveler still had to board stagecoaches for the slow and laborious trip to the summit of the mountain. Toward the top, grades were so steep that passengers were obliged to alight and walk.

Bicycle-driver locomotive found on the Canajoharie & Catskill. Built by H.R. Dunham & Co., New York City, between 1836-1839.

Beach realized that a railroad in the mountains was a modern necessity. Construction was pushed ahead and in the summer of 1882 the first regular train ran over the Catskill Mountain Railway, stopping at each of the ten neat little stations between Catskill Landing and the western terminus at Palenville.

Two 4-4-0 Dickson 3-foot locomotives equipped with Eames vacuum brakes hauled the first passenger cars, which had Janney couplers with foreign type disk bumpers. The freight cars were provided with link-and-pin couplers. Subsequently, more locomotives were obtained from the Rodgers and Schenectady locomotive works, and observation cars were also added to the trains.

The Alfred Van Santford, CMR's No. 5, was built by Rodgers in 1912. After six years of dedicated service, she was sold to a distant narrow gauge line.

The little railroad achieved immediate popularity. Volume of traffic increased rapidly, and extensions of the line followed. A branch line named the Cairo Railroad was constructed from Cairo Junction north to the popular resort of Cairo. A spur was built to a shale pit near Cairo Junction from which thousands of carloads of shale were hauled down to the Kaaterskill Shale Brick Plant at Catskill.

However, passengers for mountain resorts were still obliged to de-train for carriages at Mountain House Road and Palenville station. This disadvantage was overcome in 1892 by the construction and opening of the Otis Railway, an inclined road 7000 feet long, built right up the side of the mountain, ascending from Otis Junction at the base to Otis Summit, 2200 feet above the Hudson River. The latter station was only 300 feet from the Catskill Mountain House.

Cars were hauled by double steel cables passing over an enormous drum at the top. Ascending and descending cars moved simultaneously, passing each other on a loop switch midway from the terminals. Passengers 75 to 100 to a train sat with their backs to the mountainside, looking eastward over a vast natural panorama. Flat cars carried baggage and freight.

One of the Catskill & Tannersville's second pair of 2-6-0s, the Alfred V.S. Olcott, like its mate, the Isaac Pruyn, was a Baldwin product of 1900. This F.W. Blauvelt glass plate photo was taken especially for Angus Sinclair's magazine Railway & Locomotive Engineering.

Catskill Mountain Railroad No. 1, the S. Sherwood Day, poses on the trestle across the marshes west of Catskill Landing, before a wreck ruined its diamond smoke stack. A 4-4-0 American-type built by Dickson in 1882, she eventually was retired in 1918.

The new railroads cut the trip to Catskill from New York to the summit of the mountains to less than four hours. Thus, tourists leaving Grand Central Station on the New York Central's 4 P.M. express connected with Catskill Mountain train number 15 and landed at Otis Summit in three and three-quarter hours, including the ferry transfer from Greendale Station on the NYC to Catskill Landing.

Further enterprise built the Catskill & Tannersville Railway (known locally as the Huckleberry) from Otis Summit westward through Haines Falls to Tannersville. For this heavy gradient line of 5.5 miles, two 2-6-0 locomotives were pur- chased from one of the Denver & Rio Grande narrow gauges.

They were originally woodburners with driving wheels inside the frames. One of these antiques had to be scrapped and its boiler used to heat the Mountain House. But the Catskill Mountain Railway System was complete.

Year after year, it continued to prosper. Its management was efficient, its personnel courteous. No passenger was ever killed or seriously injured.

Then came the automobile to cast its blight upon the steamboats and the railroad. With the aid of convict labor, New York State built a concrete highway from Palenville up the Kaaterskill Clove to the mountaintop. As the roar of gasoline motors rose louder in the sylvan retreat, traffic on the CMR declined. Once coal-black annual reports began to show a tinge of red. On April 30, 1917, the CMR passed under control of the Hudson River Steamboat Co. In a futile attempt to keep the railroad alive, it was re-organized as the Catskill Mountain Railroad Corporation; but in 1918 the last mellow tones of the little locomotive's whistle echoed through the mountains.

The rolling stock was sold to distant narrow gauge roads in Mexico, South America and elsewhere. Rails and bridges¾except for the first bridge at Catskill which had been retained for pedestrian use¾were sold as scrap metal. Now, after three decades [1949], trees and grass have obliterated the right-of-way, and only a distinct gash up the mountainside marks the roadbed of the Otis Railway.

No memories of the CMR can fail to include its "grand old man," John Leonard Driscoll. Few rails have been as versatile, for he engineered construction, served as superintendent and demonstrated genius as master mechanic. In its 36 years of operation, the Catskill Mountain Railway never had an accident or a single engine failure. On his 100th birthday in 1937, Driscoll's Masonic Lodge presented him with an engraved bell from number 3, the Charles T. Van Sanford. When the old railroader passed away at the age of 103, the engine bell was returned to the Masonic Temple in Catskill. Highly polished and mounted on a mahogany base, with a bronze tablet, it is a treasured possession. Its tone has a remarkable mellow quality.

With their polished brasswork and glistening paint, Driscoll's locomotives were a joy to behold. All bore the names of CMR officers. The engines and the clean wine-colored coaches they hauled were the admiration of this writer, who frequently rode the Catskill Mountain trains in his younger days.

The oldest surviving engineer of the CMR is Frank Ruf, still hale and hearty at the age of eighty. He worked for the line for 30 years, four as fireman and 26 on the right-hand side of the cab. For most of this time, he handled the throttle of the number 2, the John T. Mann. "I was wedded to that engine," he remarked in a recent talk with the writer. "I never had an accident in thirty years except once while switching; then a pile of bricks rolled over the track and upset the engine."

"I crawled out without a scratch," he continued with a grin. "I had a young fellow firing for me who was keen to become an engineer. He crawled out rather slowly, I thought.

'Why the heck didn't you jump when you felt her going over?' I asked him. 'Well,' he replied, 'I was going to, but then I decided I'd better stick to her and get this new experience'!"

The upper portion of the Otis Elevated near the summit in 1902, shortly before the trestle was rebuilt. Notice the open-style passenger car with a baggage cart in tow.

The Otis Elevating Railway was one of the novel highlights of the Catskill region. This cable line commenced operations in August 1892 and provided a rail link from the Catskill Mountain Railway into the mountains. CMR's engine no. 4, the Charles L. Beach, is seen here at Otis Junction.

TELLTALES