THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD COMPANY
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Notice is hereby given that Train 595, leaving
Elmira, New York, daily, at 5:24 A.M., Eastern
Standard Time, arriving in Canandaigua, New York, at 7:50 A.M., Eastern Standard
Time; Train 596, leaving Canandaigua, daily except Sunday, at 8:55 P.M., Eastern
Standard Time, arriving at Elmira, New York, at 10:55 P.M., Eastern Standard
Time, and Train 598, Sunday only, leaving Canandaigua, a 9:10 P.M., Eastern
Standard Time, and arriving at Elmira at 11:08 P.M., Eastern Standard Time,
will be discontinued at 12:00 Noon, September 25, 1955.
C.D.MERRILL, Superintendent.
Death Knell - This was the notice posted late last summer along the Pennsylvania
between Williamsport and Canandaigua to announce the railroad's plan to remove
the last of the passenger trains. The notices were put up to conform with the
law. Having notified the public the railroad applied for permission to abandon
the trains to the New York State Public Service Commission and the Pennsylvania
Public Utility Commission. Delays postponed the abandonment of the runs in New
York State until Jan. 3.
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On the Pennsy Through Elmira
The Last Passengers
By W. Charles Barber
The diesel engine thrummed, the conductor called "B-o-a-r-d!" in his best voice and the train pulled away, its rear lights drawing closer together until they were lost in the night. The time was 11:20 Monday night, Jan. 2, 1956. The train was Pennsylvania No. 596. The occasion was its last run, its rendezvous with time's changes - its departure into history. It was the last Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train through Elmira. Truly a sad hour for those who love the railroads and grieve over the state of passenger business which takes a toll each year of the trains which once meant so much to American transportation.
Train 596 and its northbound opposite number 595 were the last of a schedule of six trains each way in the heyday of the railroad's passenger history. They were busy, too, those dozen trains which used to pass through Elmira over the Pennsylvania and its predecessor roads.
Gradually, they fell one by one until there were only two left - one northbound early in the morning from Williamsport to Canandaigua and the other late at night southbound from Canandaigua. In late years. few fare-paying heads were at the windows. The railroad operated the trains at a loss.
There was often talk that the Pennsy would remove the last of its two trains through Elmira. Last September, notices went up announcing the trains' discontinuance as of Sept. 25. Authorization was not immediately forthcoming. But it came with the end of the year and the trains made their last runs on the second day of the new year.
The first passenger train on what is now the Pennsylvania Railroad rolled into Elmira on Monday Morning, Aug. 7, 1854 -101 years and four months ago. In those 1,226 months, the road has had three names - Williamsport & Elmira, Northern Central and Pennsylvania. It has gone from light, wood-burning locomotives to coal-burning engines and lately to diesels as power for its passenger trains. And, as previously noted, it dropped from a dozen passenger trains to no passenger trains a day.
The railroad began its career in Elmira as Elmira College's first building was going up. The Chemung Canal had 22 years of life left and some of the years were the greatest the canal ever knew. Its trains carried boys on their way to and from five wars - Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and Korea, and some units of the Nation Guard, on their way to the Mexican Border incident of 1916 rode its red coaches. It brought into Elmira and out again some of the troops captured in the Civil War and sent here between 1863 and 1865 to sit out the war in the Elmira Prison Camp.
It began operating long before passenger conductors and trainmen wore uniforms - they didn't come until about 1876 in time for the Centennial. And its early trains were operated without benefit of air brakes and automatic coupling. History galore has been written along its tracks. Such industries as tanneries, stave plants, lime kilns and wagon works have come along, flourished for a season and then passed into memory. Millport was a big town when the Williamsport & Elmira began to connect with the Canandaigua & Niagara Falls Railroad which ran northward from Elmira along the Chemung Canal which it helped to doom. And there are the ghosts of many once-busy settlements along its tracks.
Messrs. Baldwin and Dumars, (Lathrop Baldwin and R.R. R. Dumars) followed the progress of the Williamsport & Elmira rather closely in the Elmira Republican which they had taken over from the brothers Charles and Seymour Fairman, who sold it when they established the Elmira Advertiser in 1853.
The railroad was an important link with the South in the Civil War in which Baldwin and Dumars both served with distinction. Baldwin was a colonel whose name was preserved until a little over a decade ago by a Grand Army of the Republic Post. Dumars won distinction as a captain. Both, with hundreds of boys who had enlisted here, went to the front via Harrisburg and Washington over the Williamsport & Elmira.
The railroad between Elmira and Williamsport was proposed as early as 1832, and some work on it was actually done. In 1846 the Legislature extended the time for its completion but work lagged under this charter. The year 1852 brought a new organization chartered by both New York and Pennsylvania, stimulated by the Erie which was completed between Piermont and Dunkirk in 1851 and the proposal to build a rail road to Corning via Blossburg to connect with the Erie. This line was later to be the Fall Brook, now a part of the New York Central System. Later years brought still another railroad from the south - the State Line into Mansfield, and Blossburg - later the Tioga Division of the Erie.
Gen. A.S. Diven was credited with bringing the Williamsport & Elmira into reality and he and Lewis J. Stancliff were contractors. Diven was a great railroader. He helped to build the Erie, and was long a director and an officer in it, helped to build the State Line, the Delaware & Hudson and the Missouri Pacific.
The Williamsport & Elmira was begun in earnest on Jan. 1, 1853, and finished Aug. 1, 1854, with its first passenger train six days later.
Three railroad companies operated between Williamsport and Canadaigua in those days. They were the Williamsport & Elmira, covering the 75 miles between the cities; the Chemung Railroad, which spanned the 17 1/2 miles between Elmira and Watkins; and the Jefferson & Canandaigua which ran the 46 miles between Watkins (or Jefferson) and Canandaigua.
The Northern Central Railroad Co. leased the Williamsport & Elmira May 1, 1853. It leased the other two in October, 1866. It also leased rights over the New York Central from Canandaigua to Rochester, thus giving it a through line from Rochester to Elmira. The Northern Central had big shops in Elmira, and the town hummed with railroad activity.
With the Williamsport & Elmira, the city had north-south transportation as well as east-west over the Erie. A third rail was laid so the Williamsport & Elmira trains could use the Erie right-of-way into town, the Erie then being broad gauge (six feet) and the Williamsport & Elmira standard (4 feet 8 1/2 inches). The same tracks were used later by the Lehigh Valley which came into town over the Erie from Waverly and Sayre in 1870.
In 1876, the Utica, Ithaca & Elmira (UI&E) was opened to write a great story of lumber development in the region northeast of Elmira. In 1882 the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western came into Elmira, using a considerable expanse of the Junction Canal towpath.
All the railroads were busy, passenger-wise, in those days. They offered
a rapid means of communication to all points of the compass from Elmira. Excursions
ran over them to Rochester, Utica, Lake Erie, New York and numerous were the
cars needed to accommodate the excursion traffic. Often one of these excursion
trains carried more passengers than the road for a whole week on the past of
the Pennsy's passenger trains.