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The Blairstown Railway (BRW) opened in 1877 and ran between Blairstown and Delaware, New Jersey, a distance of approximately 12 miles (19 km). The single-track railroad was built under the direction of railroad magnate John I. Blair, one of the wealthiest persons in the United States at that time, who had previously built the Warren Railroad, and for whom Blairstown is named. ==History== The Blairstown Railway started at what is now Footbridge Park in Blairstown and ended at the Lackawanna Railroad's station, which was located between Clinton and Clarence Streets in Delaware. The BRW itself never grew beyond its initial size. Legend has it that Blair built the BRW so that his wife to be able to travel from their home in Blairstown to New York City and back in one day for shopping. Although such a tale is plausible, and serves to give Blair a more human side than he is often given credit for, it would have been completely out of character for the notoriously frugal Blair to have built what would have amounted to an extravagant toy for the occasional use of his eighty-year-old wife. Rather, it is far more likely that Blair was aware that there were railroads — specifically, the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad and the Lehigh and New England Railroad — who were surveying routes through the Blairstown area into Pennsylvania and who might want to use his BRW as part of their route if he built it before they could. Indeed, given the topography of the Blairstown area, and Blair's penchant for being at least one step ahead of the competition (and ideally holding the trump card too), Blair's strategy was probably to build the BRW, and wait. Blair would only have to wait four years (1881) before the New Jersey Midland Railroad extended its tracks from Sparta, New Jersey to connect to the BRW, and through trains began plying the rails of the BRW. Later, the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad (NYS&W), a corporate successor of the New Jersey Midland RR, and the Lehigh & New England Railroad (L&NE), a competitor that also needed Blair's route (via trackage rights), would turn Blair's bucolic branchline into a somewhat bustling mainline, albeit for two relatively small players in the railroad arena. Clearly, if it had Blair's intent that the entire BRW would be used by another railroad to connect to the Lackawanna Railroad at Delaware, he was sadly mistaken. For the L&NE would use only about six miles of the BRW (to Hainesburg Junction) and the NYS&W about nine miles (to a point called Columbia Junction, located about where Interstate 80 crosses Columbia Lake today), with the remainder of the route to Delaware being run as a vestigal branchline. But, perhaps this was Blair's plan all along. Blair would die in 1899 at the age of 99. A dozen years after Blair's death, in 1911, Blairstown would receive a second train station, located about a mile or so up the hill from Blair's station. This one, however, would be located on the Lackawanna Cut-Off. As such, the Hainesburg-Delaware section south of Hainesburg Junction − the so-called Delaware Branch − would be abandoned in 1928. The L&NE went out of business in 1961, resulting in the tracks west of Hainesburg Junction being removed. In 1963, the NYS&W removed the tracks from Sparta Junction to Blairstown. And, in the late 1980s, the abandoned rail right-of-way between Sparta Junction and Knowlton Township, New Jersey would become the Paulinskill Valley Trail. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Blairstown Railway」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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