History
When the Camden and Amboy Rail Road and Transportation Company opened its original Trenton-New Brunswick line in 1839, the line was located along the east bank of the Delaware and Raritan Canal, about one mile (2 km) from downtown Princeton. The new alignment (now the Northeast Corridor Line) opened in 1863, but some passenger trains continued to use the old line until the Princeton Branch opened on May 29, 1865, using a Grice & Long steam dummy for passenger service.
The Pennsylvania Railroad leased and began to operate the C&A, including the Princeton Branch, in 1871. Penn Central Transportation took over operations in 1968, and, when Conrail was formed in 1976, the line was transferred to the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
The Princeton train, locally called the "Dinky" or the "PJ&B" (for "Princeton Junction and Back"), is a unique symbol of Princeton University that has grown over time to emblemize the University. It is mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise", featured in the TV program "Family Ties" when young Alex P. Keaton goes for his on-campus interview, and it is also in the 1934 Bing Crosby Movie "She Loves Me Not". The theme of Princeton and the train is repeated again in the University's own traditional homecoming song "Going Back to Nassau Hall" by Kenneth S. Clark (1905). In it, the line "We'll clear the track as we go back" refers to the Princeton Branch tracks that stop on campus.
Read more about this topic: Princeton Branch
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)