Lackawanna Old Road - The Warren Railroad

The Warren Railroad

The Warren Railroad was a 19-mile (31 km) route between an interchange with the CNJ at Hampton, New Jersey, and the Lackawanna's mainline at the Delaware River. Terrain made the Warren very expensive to build, for it required a large amount of excavation, three large bridges, and two tunnels. Construction started in 1853; the line opened to rail traffic three years later.

In 1862, Oxford Tunnel (also known as Van Ness Gap Tunnel) opened, relieving trains of a slow and arduous climb on a temporary track over Van Ness Gap. Yet the new tunnel did not prevent the subsequent collapse of the DLW-CNJ merger plan, which shattered the premise for the building of the Warren Railroad. The M&E quickly emerged as the logical replacement for the CNJ, as it would give the Lackawanna a station on the Hudson River. The more southern route of the Warren Railroad had been chosen in anticipation of a CNJ-DL&W merger. With an M&E-DL&W merger, the Warren Railroad was no longer a straight shot between the two railroads; it was now circuitous. Worse yet, the section between the New Jersey towns of Washington and Hampton (later called the Hampton Branch) was all but useless.

Oxford Tunnel was double-tracked in 1869, and for a few decades, suffered no more serious problems than the intermittent water (and sometimes flooding) also seen in its sister tunnel at Manunka Chunk. But by the 1890s, the era's larger locomotives and rolling stock had trouble fitting through the tunnel. In 1901, the railroad installed gauntlet track in the tunnel, effectively turning it into a single-track bottleneck — another reason to build the Lackawanna Cut-Off.