Eastern Railroad Discussion > CP's D&H in Pennsylvania on borrowed time

It has been well advertised that CP announced that their Freight Subdivision in New York, and their Sunbury Subdivision in Pennsylvania are currently up for sale. While we are still waiting to find out what this means for the future of operations on the D&H "South End", we do know that it will no longer be operated by CP. CP already scaled back their Pennsylvania operations back in 2013 by terminating their direct services to Philadelphia and Oak Island, NJ. Today, the only CP powered road freight that operates south of Binghamton, NY is the tri-weekly train 258/259 to Allentown and Bethlehem. CP 258-19 only made it as far as Lehighton, PA last night, as the ever expanding NS meltdown prevented them from being accepted at Allentown yard. So a relief crew came out this afternoon to finish the trip over the NS Lehigh Line. Pictured below are two shots of the 258 running eastbound on the former CNJ main through Lehigh Gap, PA, with some nice fall color still clinging to the Blue Mountain. Get your shots of CP operations in PA while you still can!

Jon

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same general area of your current day images but the date is September 22, 1985 that this mixed freight was heading north.

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I REALLY like Pic 2!!

Nice catch with the older power as well. I was hoping to catch a CP or NS train during my trip to the Lehigh Gorge last week, but no luck.

Pattenburg, thanks for the photo. It's really neat to compare the now and then look.

Nice Jon, thanks for posting and climbing the hill to get the shot.

Great stuff Jon. Glad we did that D&H stuff around Sctanton a few years back!

Posted from iPhone

I think we see evidence of the former Lehigh & New England roadbed above the trains in all three photos. This would have been the branch into Palmerton and connecting with the Chestnut Ridge Rwy, I think. In photo #3 one can see a bridge pier for the former L&NE structure over the Lehigh River and, in the foreground, is a track that was former Lehigh Valley RR.

It wasn't accepted because the CP makes them do so much work enroute it can't make it with any time left! They went overboard at 8pm and were barely able to even make it to Lehighton! It became quite the road block at Lehighton too as the hazleton trains and a M2T all had to use the hand throws at Packerton to get around it.

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Nice shots, Jon!

Glad we shot what we did with this operation over the years...the changes are the constant here.

~RGDave

Jon, Great stuff. Pattenburg: I saw your photo, and thought, "gee, that train looks familiar".

Back story. I was but 8 years old. My Mom took me to Jim Thorpe to see the RDG 2102 arrive from Reading, having no idea that the train would have passed thru our town (at the time) of Northampton, PA. We rode the George Hart "Panther Valley RR" excursion out to Hometown trestle & back, and then we waited and waited for 2102 to arrive. We eventually left. But I remember seeing a northbound freight with a Lehigh Valley engine, being astonished that any such creatures still existed. In my later years, I surmised that it would have been a D&H unit. But with Conrail power leading?

So, I googled "Sept 22 1985 Jim Thorpe" to find that indeed that was the same day 2102 made its fateful trip to Jim Thorpe, beset significantly by operational delays and "bad water" that probably had firefighting additive in it or something. We'd later heard that the train didn't arrive until after dark.

A video on Youtube of the 2102 that I found in my search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9KrCAjqgEk

Quite amazing that a distant childhood memory was able to be brought forth in such detail.
This is why I love Trainorders.

-Alex