First U.S. Railroad, the Delaware & Hudson, May Soon Chug Into History

As a boy back in the 1920s, Dick Williams spent his happiest hours down at the railroad yard with his father, a dispatcher.

In those days the railroads were in their heyday, already a legend of America’s expansion and industrialization. In young Williams’ view, no occupation could be more romantic or more necessary than railroading.

Or more permanent. Because the railroad that employed his father, and that he later served for 40 years, was the Delaware & Hudson Railroad Co., the venerable D & H, the nation’s oldest railroad. It made its first run in 1829.

It might make its last run any day now.

If no one buys the D & H in the next few weeks, men will unhook its cars and sell them off one by one. Dick Williams always felt he would be long dead before such a historical ignominy would ever come to pass.

“It’s hard to see this happening to a railroad you worked on your entire life,” he says. Williams, who is 61, took early retirement six years ago because he couldn’t bear to stick around for the end.

If no buyer comes forward, more than 400 workers who make sure the D & H runs on time between Montreal and Washington and between Albany and Buffalo will lose their jobs. And a chapter of American folklore will end.

The Delaware & Hudson didn’t start out as a railroad.

In 1823, brothers William and Maurice Wurtz, merchants from Philadelphia, carved out a canal from northern Pennsylvania to Kingston, N.Y., for the transport of barges loaded with coal.

Six years later, the brothers began using a new technology called a “gravity line.” Stationary steam engines hauled cable cars up the hills and gravity took them down. Horses pulled them over the flats.

D & H began using steam locomotives in 1860 and gradually expanded into the Northeast and Canada.

During the Civil War, the D & H hauled coal to northern arsenals. In 1885, a D & H train carried the body of Ulysses S. Grant for viewing before the Union general and former President was buried in New York. In the next century, American soldiers rode the D & H south to fight the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa.

Before World War II began, Winston Churchill rode the D & H into Canada after he visited Washington to ask Congress for financial help in the fight against Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

In those days, more than 250,000 miles of track crisscrossed America. Dick Williams, a telegraph operator and dispatcher as his father was before him, watched it all and marveled.

Today, his Albany home is a museum of D & H memorabilia. One item is an old telegraph “bug” his father gave him when he was 12 years old. He can still tap out words, still remembers the Morse Code 30 years after the D & H stopped using telegraphs.

Williams eventually became a fireman, and worked his way up to be general manager in 1980.

“Railroad men were a breed all by themselves.” he remembers. “They’d do anything for one another. It was like a family. You felt good accomplishing what you were supposed to do. You took pride in your work.”

Railroad business began declining in the 1950s with the expansion of the interstate highway system and cross-country trucking.

“Trucks had a highway system that was free to them. Railroads had to own the property they ran over, and in most cases had to pay taxes on that property,” William says.

By the 1970s, mergers and acquisitions were commonplace as the railroads struggled to stay alive. The federal government got involved and the result was Conrail, an amalgamation of the Penn Central, New Jersey Central, Reading, Erie Lackawanna and several smaller railroads that were either bankrupt or about to be.

Conrail would restore to D & H the friendly connections it had lost when several railway companies around it merged, federal officials said. They said the move also would allow D & H to expand to Buffalo and as far south as Washington, and that D & H could remain competitive with the federally subsidized Conrail.

Although Williams agrees that some federal action was necessary to save railroading in the Northeast, he says what was done did little to help D & H, which had to haul freight over Conrail track at a price set by Conrail. That price wasn’t competitive, Williams says.

“We had an opportunity to provide some competition and we attempted to have a profitable operation, but it didn’t work,” he said. “But you had to try or you were dead. Conrail was a blood transfusion for D & H, that’s all.”

D & H struggled to remain solvent, propped up by state and federal subsidies. From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, D & H received almost $40 million in federal aid.

By 1980, D & H was one of the last major privately owned railroads in the Northeast, and it was losing money. It lost $14 million in 1982.

Hope for survival was revived in 1984 by the Guilford Transportation Industries of Billerica, Mass. Guilford owner Timothy Mellon, a financier and descendant of the Pittsburgh banking family, bought D & H to complete a Northeast rail network made up of the Guilford-owned Maine Central and Boston & Maine railroads.

With the D & H, Guilford had a system that reached from New England to Buffalo, with legs north to Montreal and south to Baltimore and Washington. It represented an attempt to compete with Conrail in the Northeast.

Then negotiations with D & H employees for labor contract changes fell through, and four years after it purchased D & H, Guilford put it into bankruptcy.

Guilford officials blamed the railroad’s demise on archaic union work rules at D & H, Williams says, and the railroaders blamed Guilford’s inexperience in running a railroad.

The future of the D & H now rests with a Washington lawyer, Francis Dicello, the trustee appointed by a federal bankruptcy court in 1988.

Dicello says he will try to find a buyer for the line. Failing that, he may ask the court’s permission to liquidate the company.

D & H President Carl Belke insists that the railroad will survive, however.

“We intend to be here, one way or another,” he said.