If you thought the Syracuse Branch was a typical backwoods, sleepy stretch of single track hosting a
local freight or two serving small customers in farming villages in upstate New York, well you are
partially correct. We will admit the above was not a typical train but for around twenty-five days in the
summer of 1972 and again in 1975, EL was forced to route many symbol freights between Binghamton
and the Penn Central at Syracuse. Lehigh Valley also showed up with F’s, GP’s and C628’s. And Charles
E. Turley was there to record the scene.
In less hectic times, in the closing years of the steam era, the Syracuse Branch provided a refuge for
Hudsons and Poconos driven off the main line by the new offerings of EMD. Rapid dieselization brought
RS3’s followed by GP7’s which became a fixture on the line until the coming of Conrail. But during this
quarter century following the end of steam, almost every diesel model on EL’s roster appeared; SW1,
NW2, HH600, GE 44T, S2, RS3, GP7, F3, F7, E8, H24-66, C425, GP35, SD45, SD45P, U25B and
U33C. And Robert Pastorkey has provided black and white images of the late steam era as well as the
varied first generation diesel era. Second generation power showed up en masse on the detour trains and is
presented in Turley’s color images.
And there were trains to be handled. There were road freights and locals. There were coal trains to the
Oswego coal terminal and industrial customers such as Crucible Steel, Wickwire Bros., Brockway Trucks
and Smith Corona. There was a daily “stone train” shuttling back and forth between the Solvay limestone
quarry in Jamesville and the Solvay plant on the north side of nearby Syracuse. These two related
facilities of Allied Chemical together constituted the largest traffic generator on the railroad. Passenger
trains ran until 1958 and included Pullman sleepers between Syracuse and Hoboken/Philadelphia. The
Sheffield creamery at Homer had become the railroad’s largest creamery and was loading trailers on
piggyback flat cars as late as 1966.
Not bad for a “branch”.
