BY WALTER ELLIOTT
EAST ORANGE – Dec. 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of a 20-year railroad project that has changed the landscape and improved safety here and in 12 other towns from Hoboken to Summit and Montclair.
The 5:28 a.m. Delaware Lackawanna and Western westbound train to Summit ran on the just-completed three-mile elevated stretch between Newark’s Roseville Avenue and Orange stations Tuesday Dec. 18, 1922.
That train also opened the new Grove Street, East Orange and Brick Church stations to passengers along the way. A later DL&W eastbound train made a similar run later that morning.
Those train runs completed the last link in a 20-year grade separation project that eliminated multiple grade crossings. Nineteen of those grade crossings were in Orange and East Orange.
The Lackawanna Railroad had systematically lowered or raised their Morris & Essex, Montclair Branch and Boonton Line track elevations since 1900. Only the elevation at South Orange’s Mountain Station remained unchanged.
The project, overseen by Lackawanna president William H. Truesdale and the railroad’s team of engineers, was the first extensive use of reinforced concrete to build walls or support elevated tracks. The elevated portions are still seen here in East Orange and South Orange Village.
A reversible center “rush hour express” track was added to the two east and westbound tracks.
Truesdale, the Lackawanna board of directors and Chief Engineer George J. Ray sought faster service while eliminating hazardous grade crossings. The separations included the Erie Railroad crossing at Bloomfield’s Watsessing Junction and the Morris Canal plane at Newark’s Orange Road.
The increasing volume of pedestrian, horse, bicycle, streetcar and automotive traffic – and their grade crossing collisions – were growing at the turn of the last century. Fatality and injury reports became as common as today’s mass shooting incidents.
Although the Lackawanna Railroad, with state Public Utilities Commission blessing, had committed itself to the grade separation project, matters came to a head on Thursday Feb. 19, 1903.
A Lackawanna express train cut a North Jersey Street Railway Company trolley in two at Newark’s Clifton Avenue grade crossing. Nine people, all Barringer High School students, were killed and 29 more people were injured.
A grand jury inquest found that unsanded icy rails on the Orange Street decline kept the streetcar motorman from stopping the trolley – which went through the lowered crossing gates.
The panel handed down manslaughter indictments against four NJSRC employees and all seven members of its leadership. A stained glass mural, dedicated to the killed students, remains on display at BHS.
The Newark Municipal Council then passed an ordinance directing grade separation of all Class One railroads within city limits. The Lackawanna, Pennsylvania and Central of New Jersey railroads responded by either raising or depressing their tracks’ elevation within Newark.
Parts of the Erie’s Greenwood Lake Division and Newark Branch in North Newark plus a short Lehigh Valley freight line in the South Ward, however, remain at grade.
The Lackawanna particularly responded by elevating its Broad Street station, building bridges over three Newark streets and digging the Roseville Cut. It was made a priority of its initial 1903-05 grade separation project with Harrison and Summit.
The project, done while running scheduled passenger and freight trains, continued at Morristown (1912), Chatham (1915), South Orange and Madison (1916) and Orange (1918.). Nineteen grade crossings were replaced in Orange alone by 12 bridges and by changing the tracks’ radius at Scotland Road.
Montclair Branch’s first phase – from the Grove Street, Montclair terminal through Glen Ridge and Bloomfield – was done in 1912-13. Its Watsessing Cut in Bloomfield allowed Lackawanna trains to pass under the Erie Orange Branch’s Watsessing Junction bridge.
The project – whether on the Montclair Branch or on the M&E – ended at the East Orange border until disputes with city elders were resolved.
Mayors Julian A. Gregory (1914-18) and Charles H. Martens (1918-52) and their respective City Council members first objected to the grade separation on the view that the railroad would build “a Chinese wall” that would separate the city.
Martens, on his inauguration, then suggested depressing the railroad instead across East Orange.
Ray and his engineers said that depressing the track was impossible. The “East Orange Cut” would face water runoff seepage or flooding from Watchung Mountain streams and the trains would have difficulty climbing onto the 1890 stone arch bridge over the North Oraton Parkway.
Ray offered instead building a pair of 864-foot-long viaducts above East Orange and Brick Church stations. The railroad would also raise The Parkway Arches by adding 15 feet in height.
City elders had meanwhile taken to railroad to Essex County Superior Court over who will pay to replace underground water, sewer and natural gas mains. The Lackawanna a standard 10-percent “municipal contribution” for the construction.
Some towns readily agreed to paying the 10 percent charge. Bloomfield, for example, saw the benefit of eliminating its Glenwood Avenue grade crossing – which had among the worst collision tolls in the state.
Some other towns, like Orange, reluctantly paid. 1913 City Council President John Fineran told the “Newark Evening News” that “Orange shouldn’t be asked to pay a cent for the changes” and “It’s a disgrace that the death crossings are allowed to kill and maim our citizens because of a false notion of economy held by the wealthy railroad management.”
East Orange and the Lackawanna Railroad had gone to court before. The city asked a judge in the 1870s to have the railroad pay for crossing flagmen at Chestnut, Walnut and Clinton streets.
The relationship had not started out as hostile. Brick Church Station, for example, started out as an M&E flag stop by the home of attorney Matthias Ogden Halsted in 1836. Halsted, after buying neighboring land and building houses, offered the Lackawanna a new station at no cost in exchange for having all express trains stopping there in 1880.
Lackawanna, before an Essex County judge in 1921, agreed to pay for the utility line replacement. The city then agreed to let the grade separation project through.
The railroad promptly hired 800 workers and put $4 million (or $70.955 million in today’s inflation-adjusted money) into the 18 month project. A temporary grade level track was laid along then-McKinley Street (now King Boulevard and Freeway Drive West). until the concrete was poured, ballast added the new tracks were elevated.
Similar work resumed on the Montclair Branch, elevating Ampere stations and building bridges over North Grove and Rutledge streets, Springdale Avenue and Fourth Street.
The construction would be the largest project in East Orange until the Garden State Parkway (1952-54) and Interstate 280 (1968-73) were put through. I-280, after a similar right-of-way debate was built as a depressed highway.
Whether the grade separation was worthwhile can be determined by comparing the Erie Railroad’s fate here.
The Erie, which never had the financial resources of the Lackawanna, had to deal with dozens of grade crossings in its Orange Branch in Newark, Belleville, Bloomfield, East Orange, Orange and West Orange.
West Orange-Jersey City passenger service ended on May 20, 1955. Daily freight service dwindled until the Erie Lackawanna Railway ended that service in 1979. Its tracks between West Orange’s Erie Loop and East Orange’s Meadow Street were torn up 1979-82.
East Orange and the Lackawanna went to court again on May 12, 1923. The city sought an injunction to keep the railroad from turning its below viaduct parking spaces in East Orange and Brick Church stations into stores. (South Orange had later allowed such storefront creation by the 1960s.)
