On September 17, 2015, the second-to-last day before the take over by Norfolk Southern, the D&H lives again for one brief moment in North East Pennsylvania. D&H GP38-2 7303 is the power for a large Liquid Natural Gas Heat Exchanger from Air Products in Wilkes-Barre, PA, seen here slowly riding the rails from the L&S interchange in Hudson, PA to a few miles railroad north to Dupont, PA, where it will be handed over the Reading & Northern (as seen in the next video).
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History of the D&H in Northeast PA:
The Delaware Hudson has a long, continuous history of operations throughout the Northeastern US. With rails being laid throughout the mid-1860's, the D&H was the (and still is) the continuously operating Railroad in the United States. Up until September 19, 2015, the D&H was still a thriving subsidiary to the Canadian Pacific Railway here in Northeast PA. Over the years, the D&H property shifted boundaries many times due to the economy and several purchases and abandonment of right-of-ways. The original D&H Penn Division between Carbondale, PA and Nineveh Jct, NY is long gone, after traffic was shifted to the DLW mainline in purchased in 1982. The section seen in this video is still a remnant of the original D&H Penn Division from Scranton to Wilkes-Barre PA, where they joined the Pennsylvania Railroad. By 1984, the struggling operations were absorbed into Guilford Rail System with the idea of connecting Maine to southern NY and PA. This railroad never had enough money and proper management to get it off the ground, ending up being one of the biggest failures of a company which went bankrupt 4 years later in 1988. The D&H briefly came back into service with help from the NY government and NYS&W railroad, finally being purchased by Canadian Pacific in 1991. CP successfully reorganized the D&H assets from the Canadian Border south to Albany and Binghamton, NY, and continued the D&H markets south on the former DLW and PRR mainlines to reach Sunbury / Harrisburg, PA, where haulage rights trains ran as far as Philadelphia. Up until 2009 when the economy crashed, several daily CP trains operated under a D&H-like pattern to several cities in the NEUS. By 2014, a struggling effort to maintain customers along with a mis-managed railroad under the harsh regime of E Hunter Harrison finally lead to a deal in which Norfolk Southern would purchase the 282 miles from Sunbury, PA to Binghamton to Schenectady, NY (the latter section being original D&H rails), thus concluding over 150 years of presence for the D&H in Northeast PA and Southern NY. The D&H from Albany, NY, over to Schenectday, NY, and north to the Canadian Border will still be owned and operated by the Canadian Pacific, who runs many oil, ethanol, and freight trains on that line.
With all that being said, I hope you enjoyed this historic move which appropriately brought and end to another era in railroading history.
The music in the outro is a song from the KZfaq Audio Library.