Review: Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape by Lorett Treese

While doing some research on New Jersey Shortlines, I found a few brief references to Railroads of New Jersey by Lorett Treese. I was curious and tried to find a copy online. As the book was published almost ten years ago, it had gone the way of popular rail books. Collector prices were double the list price, and higher. So I did my usual thing: wait. And soon enough, I found a new copy was available and at a small discount

Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape was not quite what I expected. In fact, the book was very different from the usual railroad-oriented texts. I wondered at first is this were not a light tourist guide for the very casual railfan. In fact, it was anything but light. Lorett Treese presented the history and current state of New Jersey railroading in a very different and refreshing manner.

To begind with, the state is divided into seven regions These are Skylands -Northwest, Delaware River -southwest, Gateway - Northeast, Shore Area - Monmouth and Ocean counties, Greater Atlantic City (that’s a contradiction) and Southers Shore at the bottom of the state. Treese covers each one from various angles, including histories of several of their prominent railroads, a few notable personalities, travel notes, current railroad activity and rail trails.

This is not your usual dry history.  It is like reading good stories from the viewpoint of someone who has visited the area.

Railroads of New Jersey gives you the feel of railroads in New Jersey from its beginnings to its present state. Most railroad books do not do that well.  They get caught up in numbers and details. You get the facts, but not much feel. Railroads of New Jersey gives a very different and refreshing view.

Treese also covers the railroads that mattered: Erie, Lackawanna, Jersey Central, the Pennsylvania, Reading and Lehigh Valley.  She also covers a lot of the smaller ones, and some short lines that became big lines. If you want the finer details such as locomotive rosters, you will have to look elsewhere. Railroads of New Jersey takes a different track, and does it well.

BTW - Lorrett Treese also wrote a book called Railroads of Pennsylvania. In fact, she wrote that one first

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More book reviews will be coming!

Standard Toy Soldier Poses: The Flamethrower Guy

One of the more spectacular weapons is the flamethrower. Films from actual combat are quite stunning, insofar as jets of flame. Whether carried on a backpack or mounted in a tank, the Flamethrower is both fascinating and terrifying

Mankind has used flame weapons since ancient times. Flaming arrows were used to cause terror and ignite fires among the enemy ranks. Pots of burning pitch were hurled by trebuchets at fortresses and formations of troops. Greek fire was used against ships. Boiling oil, very often lit afire, was poured from castle battlements upon besieging troops.

In World War I, the Germans introduced the flamethrower as a shock weapon. It was used by their elite Storm troop units. By the end of the warm, the flamethrower found a place in the arsenals of all armies. Most considered it a combat engineer’s weapon for clearing our enemy emplacements.

Until World War II, the flamethrowers spurted burning oil. That was replaced with jellied gasoline. which stuck to its target and burned longer.

The problem with the flamethrower was that it was big enough to call attention to oneself. A bullet that clipped a flamethrower could ignite it, killing the flamethrower man and anyone near him with his own weapon. That is one of the reasons flamethrowers were eventualyl repalced with weapons that shot incendiary projectiles.
The Flamethrower Guy

One of the more spectacular weapons is the flamethrower. Films from actual combat are quite stunning, insofar as jets of flame. Whether carried on a backpack or mounted in a tank, the Flamethrower is both fascinating and terrifying

Standard Toy Soldier Poses: The Heavy Machine Gunner

No weapon did as much to change the modern battlefield as the heavy machine gun. American troops first encountered them during the Spanish-American War. Machine guns changed things so much in World War I that troops had to resort to trenches for safety. The weapons were considered so powerful that several armie4s regarded them as artillery. This is not to say that there had not been other machine guns. The American Gatling Gun and French Mitrailleuse were two examples of early automatic weapons.

American Infantry companies of World War II included a heavy weapons platoon with three 60mm mortars and three .30 caliber heavy machine guns. Machine guns could be so placed that their fields of fire overlapped, making a lethal and almost impenetrable kill zone. Dead;ly as they were, the heavy machine gun had one drawback. It was primarily a defensive weapon that requires several men to operate and move.

Thanks to the automobile, machine guns could br used offensively. Mounting them in armored vehicles, trucks and cars gave machine guns the mobility to move forward quickly. A small armored vehicle known as a tankette was developed by several countries between the world wars. the size of a large automobile, tracked and lightly armored, it was thought the tankette could act as a mobile machine gun position. Tankettes proved too lightly armored and lacking in mobility to survive the battlefield. Once the war started, most were either scrapped or converted to other uses.

The heavy machine gunner in the bag of army men was regarded as a source of endless firepower.It was thought that a heavy machine gun could shoot continuously so long as it had ammunition. Little boys did not know of overheated barrels, at least until we were old enough to enlist. Our srill instructors made sure we understood the hows and whys of changing a machine-gun;’s barrel.

Several things were tried to deal with overheating. A water-filled jacket was used initially. By World War I, most armies had water-cooled machine guns. The Russians went so far as to include a small hatch into which snow or ice could be inserted. At war’s end, air-cooled machine guns also appeared. They did not totally replace their water-cooled counterparts until after World War II.

These days, light machine guns have replaced the old weapons. Heavy machine guns are mounted on vehicles. Water-cooled machine guns are all in museums. Nonetheless, the need of sustained automatic fire remains a part of modern combat.

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Making a prone heavy machine gunner was a challenge for toy soldier makers. An unusual configuration emerged. Variants of it are found in Bergen / Beton. Tim Mee, and Ajax sets.

Standard Toy Soldier Poses: The Radio Guy

Little boys do not fully understand the matter of field communication. They have yet to learn of such things as calling in artillery or calling for medevac. So it is that in the set of fighting soldiers, the radio guy is usually out there with the binoculars guy and minesweeper.

Man-carried radios first became practical in World War II. They have been a mainstay of combat units ever since then. The most common types are pack radios, though smaller types have been employed. The "walkie talkie" was a smaller hand-held radio in its day. Actually, it was the size of a shoebox. Smaller squad radios appeared in the Vietnam era. Neither they nor the walkie talkies had the range and power of a pack radio.

In real life, the radio guy is a necessity. The radio links a small unit with the larger. It gives access to all kinds of support. Radio can send a warning of unexpected conditions or call for additional firepower. Communication is essential.

Little boys preferred the shooting guy and the bazooka men and other weapon handlers. For playtime, the radio guy became a crewman on a howitser or some other back-of-the-lines work. Then again, who needs communication when your entire side of the battle is all in your own head?

The radio man is an essential part of every platoon. He is also a prime target for the enemy. In our day ,we were taught that if confronting the Russians, to get the radio man. Unlike us, who had all been familiarized with radio communication, only a designated radio operator was trained to handle the Russian radio. I don’t know if that has changed.

Milk Runs

Reading about the Pemberton and Hightstown, Lackawanna, M&NJ and NYO&W railroads, and the business of milk invariably surfaces. Milk could be considered white gold. It was a valuable commodity and remains so to this day.

The Port Orange Road, colloquially known as "the Wilsey" half a century ago, runs between route 209 and 211 a few miles from Otisville, NY. Near 209, a family of dairymen named Midosh, or Mydosh, had their home. The NYO&W track to Port Jervis ran about 50 feet away. Alongside the track were stone remains of what may have been a platform. Beside them was what looked at first liek a shallow foundation made of fieldstone. It was maybe 15 feet long and 8 to 10 feet wide, and only a couple feet deep. This was actually a cistern fed by a spring. Cans of milk would be placed there to keep it cold until the train arrived.

I have not actually visited this spot in close to 40 years.

The railroads were so good at handling milk that there would be only 1 degree of temperature change by the time it was unloaded. Of course, the word did not end there. Glass-lined refrigerated cars used to haul milk had to be steam cleaned. As little as a drop of milk left to sour could spoil a whole load.

Milk has been considered a form of wealth since ancient times. Excess milk could be traded ,sold, or made into butter and cheese to be sold later. It not only provided food for a family, but enough of it provided extra income. Modern dairies have refined the process to handle milk and create a range of food products: cream, skim milk, cheese, butter ice cream, etc.

The milk runs were usually done in conjunction with local passenger service. Milk cars would be among the other head-end cars. Railroads could pick up a load of milk quickly, so that there was no delay for passengers. The Lackawanna used its own fleet of glass-lined cars. When milk was picked up in milk cans, a regular refrigerated car was employed.

The milk runs ended for the railroad a long time ago. Trucks handle it nowadays. Most of the larger dairies are cooperatives of many independent farms. Trucks come right to the dairy rather than the farmer scrambling to meet the train. Milk is one of several commodities that had been valuable to the railroad, but are long since lost to other forms of transportation.

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Standard Toy Soldier Poses: The Tommy Gunner

Those of us of a certain age remember a frequent item in adventure movies and TV shows. Be it a gangster flick like "The Untouchables" or a World War II movie, the Thompson submachine gun was there. The iconic weapon spurted out long bursts of .45 caliber ammunition. It could cut down gangsters, bootleggers, German soldiers and Japanese marines.

Submachine guns were devised for use in trench warfare. They were intended to be a "trench broom", sweeping away enemy defenders. In fact, the first real workout for the submachine gun was by American gangsters. The fast-firing weapons were popular with bootleggers, racketeers and bank robbers of the 1920s and 1930s. Gunmen like John Dillinger were among the first to use submachine guns against armed adversaries.

The Thompson submachine gun was an American invention. It was first supplied to US Marines and sold to the British Army. Germany developed several submachine guns such as the Erma and Bergmann. They settled on the MP38 and MP40 weapons. These were cheaply made, using mostly stamped-metal parts. The United States produced its own cheap all-metal submachine gun, the M3 "Grease gun" in 1942. Britain developed the cheaply-made Sten Gun. Russia’s equivalent was the Ppsh "burp gun".

The submachine gun is an automatic weapon, magazine fed, that fires pistol ammunition. American weapons favored the .45 caliber. British and Western European submachine guns tended more toward 9mm. The advantage was the amount of firepower these weapons produced. What they had in volume of fire, they lacked in rage and breaking power.*

In World War II, submachine guns were generally issued to NCOs, especially Squad leaders, paratroopers and crews of tanks. They were popular in house-to-house and jungle fighting. With the advent of assault rifles, submachine guns were less common. Today, they are used mainly by law enforcement and security personnel. Their lack of penetrating power makes them ideal for use by police..

For boys in the old days, a Tommy gunner was a popular figure. He had a lot of firepower and he looked cool. Weapons such as the M16 and AK47 with their capacity for semi-automatic and full automatic fire have made submachine guns obsolete except for special situations.

You can learn more of light automatic weapons here: http://www.thortrains.com/getright/shootlmg.html

　

* It must be noted that Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde, and Frank Hamer, the man who ended his crime spree, both favored the Browning Automatic Rifle over submachine guns. The BAR fired rifle ammunition, which could penetrate walls and break the engine block of cars and trucks. It was more accurate and could do more damage at a much greater range than any submachine gun.

The Motivation Behind Railroads

Many a railroad was financed by the folks who would be its best customers. Early railroads were planned for various reasons. One was to make it easier to get goods to a wider market. The Lackawanna Railroad originated so that its owners could get their coal and iron to the bigger cities. The Morristown and Erie, originally the Whippany River Railroad, was begun to benefit the paper mills in the area.

Sometimes things worked the other way. Several railroads were started to bring people rather than ship to them. The Tuckerton Railroad was started to bring vacationers to Barnegat Bay and Long Beach Island. Railroads to Atlantic City and Long Branch had the same purpose. Soon after the railroads arrived, land speculators came to capitalize on the situation. They were almost always the same fellows who put up the money to build the railroad!

Then there were railroads that supported other busiesses. For a time, the Tuckerton Railroad brought folks who would be passengers on steamboats going to Long Beach Island. The men who helped start the railroad happened to own those boats. The Monmouth County Agricultural Railroad, later the Freehold and Keyport, had steamboat captains among its backers. They moored at Keyport and would take freight form the railroad to New York City. The other backers were farmers and produce brokers wanting to get their goods to the bigger market in the City.

A peculiarity of the 19^th Century is that the money men backing a specific railroad would have other things in common. For instance, almost all of the founders of the Lackawanna railroad were Presbyterian. In fact, a dispute between two of them, Phelps and Dodge, was taken to a religious court at one point. The folks behind the Tuckerton Railroad, such as Barclay Haines and the Pharo family, were all Quakers. It was obviously a religious thing that no train ran on Sundays on several of the railroads until much later. That was the case for the Lackawanna and the Tuckerton, among others. And it certainly limited passenger travel to resorts for a weekend visit. At one point, folks coming to Long Beach island for Saturday would not be able to get a train out until Tuesday.

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The community in which I sit, Freehold Borough, has its own amusing rail history. It was the starting point of the Monmouth County Agricultural Railroad, later the Freehold and Keyport. Mos tw of what was shipped out in its early years were famr products ,especially potatoes. These were not like the ones in the supermarket today. Called White Giants, they were the size of a football. The White Giants were easier to process back then. Later came the Rothschild shirt company which lasted to about 1904, to be replaced by the Kharageusian Rug factory. The factory closed in 1964, At one time, it employed almost 2,000 people.

The Freehold & Keyport, also known as the Freehold and New York, was absorbed by the Jersey Central. That was an improvement.

On the other side of town, the Pennsylvania Railroad serviced the Barkeley Cannery on what is now Manalapan Avenue. They specialized in beans. Freehold had its own musical fruit factory!