All Aboard for NJ’s Railroad and Transportation Museum!
I have the answers to the questions posed in today’s edition of The Express-Times editorial regarding Phillipsburg, New Jersey’s Railroad and Transporation museum, “Would anyone in a position of authority care to revisit Phillipsburg’s claim to its own heritage before the train pulls out for the last time, moving down the old Morris Canal footprint to the suburbs?”
And “Isn’t there one last tool to be heard to preserve Phillipsburg’s birthright?”
My emphatic answer to both questions is a resounding “Yes!”
As a founding member of the Paulinskill Valley Trail in Warren and Sussex counties, New Jersey, I am resurrecting the battle that the trail’s committee began nearly 20 years - as an integral part of the battle to preserve the abandoned New York, Susquehanna, and Western Railroad bed, extending across all of Warren County and much of Sussex County east of that county’s seat, Newton, and through seven townships in both counties.
(My wife Kathy just called me down to the kitchen for coffee; I will continue this important post later.)
Copyright © 2006-2008 Billy Givens
Bernie O'Hare said,
June 19, 2006 @ 10:26 am
Billy, I was in P-burg on Satirday and was surprised to learn it has only existed since 1861.
Billy Givens said,
June 19, 2006 @ 11:16 am
Getting back to my latest post, “All Aboard for NJ’s Railroad and Transportation Museum!,” I should have added after “Museum” - “Located in Phillipsburg, NJ!”
I have decided to continue this saga as comments to my original post rather than creating a new post for each episode.
Also, before getting back to these comments, I have to call Carol King - not the songwriter and vocal stylist but The Express-Times librarian for that publication’s news articles dating back nearly 20 years and filed by reporters long-since gone, like Mike Remerez, Don Rosselet, and David Hoff, and others whose names my faded memory over the period of nearly 20 years has forgotten.
As Carol could tell readers, I’m forever losing copies of the articles she uncannily retrieves for me, so that I have to keep going back for more. (Actually, that’s my excuse to see this lovely lady whom I have had the privilege and the pleasure of knowing for almost the last 20 years, when Kathy and our daughters Sarah and Fiona Parker-Givens first arrived in Easton from Blairstown Township, Warren County, where we had lived for four years, having moved there from the Jersey Shore.
Those four years were long enough, however, for me and other members of the Paulinskill Valley Trail Committee to launch, and set on course, our epic journey to save the abandoned railbed.
The railbed originally ran from Blairstown Township’s quaint Footbridge Park, site of the main passenger station built by the township’s most famous personage, John I. Blair. His homestead, long-since razed, sat on the grounds of what is now Blair Academy.
The station’s site was also located directly across Cedar Lake Road from the beautiful house Kathy and I bought from Len and Betty Genteen. who sold it to retire to Florida.
The station connected the Blairstown Railroad, founded and solely owned by Blair, 11 miles west across Blairstown and Knowlton townships to the tiny village of Delaware, located on what today is NJ Route 46 on the Delaware River.
That’s where Blair, after walking from his manse, through the village of Blairstown, across the picturesque wrought-iron footbridge that he later bequeathed to the village, boarded his little private train for the short journey to Delaware Village. where he connected with his really big train, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western (DL&W).
This train, which he partly owned through stock holdings as a member of the DL&W’s board of directors, took him across New Jersey to his corporate offices on New York City’s Wall Street.
Blair, born the son of a grocer in nearby Hope Village, New Jersey , orginally settled as an outpost by Bethlehem, Pennsylvnia’s Moravians, moved as a boy with his family to Blairstown. From these humble beginnings, he rose to board membership of the Union Pacific Railroad, which gave him the responsibility of building the segment of America’s first continental railroad across the entire state of Iowa.
Blair also ran, unsuccessfully, for governor of New Jersey, and he founded and bequeathed to Easton’s Lafayette College the chair of college president, together with the President’s Mansion located at the corner of the College Hill neighborhood’s College Drive and McCartney streets.
The Paulinskill Valley Trail Committee worked closely with the national Rails-to-Trail organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., because of our mutual interest in land-banking abandoned railroads for possible future use.
I am proud to say, in all modesty, that the Committee chose me to represent it at the first national Rails-to-Trails convention held in the prairie town of Aurora, Illinois, just west of Chicago.
(to be cont’d)
Billy Givens said,
June 19, 2006 @ 11:47 am
The ink had hardly dried on the real-estate closing between Lenny and Betty Genteen and Kathy and me in Hackettstown, New Jersey, when I discovered the existence of a secret agreement between Blairstown Township Committee and the Warren County Freeholder Board in Belvidere to lease or buy Footbridge Park, which the township and Weichert Realty in Hackettstown had fraudulently presented to Kathy and me as belonging the township, from its true owner: the City of Newark!
When the NYS&W bought the tiny Blairstown Railroad from John I. Blair in 1961 or so, the new owner extended the tracks to the east of Newton, Sussex County, where they connected with those to northern New Jersey and the New York City metropolitan area.
When the NYS&W went bankrupt, sometime in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s and ceased operations, it sold the bed to the City of Newark. This was about the time that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to construct a dam on the Delaware River in the Delaware Water Gap at the site of Tocks Island.
This proposal led to an environmental battle rivaling the battles of Sierra Club founder John Muir in the West. I was still living in Huntsville, Alabama, at the time, but followed this epic battle in The Nashville Tennessean, an excellent newspaper owned by The New York Times.
At that time, I never dreamed that in 1972 I would be transferred from the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, where I worked for the Army Missile Command, to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the army’s Electronics Command, and from there, when I retired, to Blairstown, and into my dream house designed and built by Lenny Genteen, an engineer who worked at the army’s nearby Piccatinney Arsenal near Net Cong, Sussex County, New Jersey.
(Net Cong, near New Jersey’s Free-Trade Zone, was the location, together with Flemington, New Jersey, in competition with Phillipsburg as the site of the Garden State’s Railroad and Transportation Museum.)
(to be cont’d)
Alan Bair said,
November 23, 2006 @ 12:04 am
May I ask are you and Captain Billy one and the same? I must say no one in the State of New Jersey has shown more dedication and energy to the promotion of Transportation and specifically Railroad Heritage as you have! I think I may have met you at one of the monthly meetings of the local chapter of National Railroad Historical Society in Morris County a few years ago! Please correct me but did I see a link to a State Museum of Transportation in of all places Allaire, New Jersey? Please keep up the great work in preserving our transportation history! I can’t think of a better or more qualified guardian of our heritage!
Could you please let me know how I can locate Bob Mohowski, an authority on the Susquehanna! I would like to do a little more research on the the old roadbed of the Susquehanna,specifically the portion from Columbia Lake to Delaware, New Jersey! I would be most grateful! Thank you for your courtesy. Alan Bair
nartiefildefe said,
December 19, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
medicine advantages of herbal medicine line pharmacy pharmacy tech salary strong medicine heartworm medicine all herbal medicine prescription medicine giant eagle pharmacy india pharmacies cultural differences in medicine pill archives of internal medicine
More Categories
Ansaid Arava Arcoxia Mobic Relafen Asthma All products Albuterol Singulair Ventorlin Birth Control All products Alesse Desogen Levlen Ortho Tri-Cyclen Ovral Blood Pressure All products Adalat Aldactone Alphagan 2% Altace Avapro Capoten Cardura Combipres Coreg Coversyl Cozaar
advikiniody said,
December 23, 2008 @ 8:18 am
Some peoples says that you need, other that you dont.
I hope you help
Dyentyverne said,
December 23, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Hello
As newly registered user i just wanted to say hello to everyone else who uses this bbs :>
shossyEvoge said,
December 27, 2008 @ 9:33 pm
Hi to all the members of this board. Thanks for my registration.