Inside Roseville Tunnel - April 21 2011 - IMG 1790

Roseville Tunnel is a two-track railroad tunnel on the Lackawanna Cut-Off in Byram Township,

Sussex County, New Jersey Sussex County is the northernmost county in the State of New Jersey. Its county seat is Newton.mileposts 51.6 and 51.8 (83 km), about north by northwest of Port Morris Junction. Operated for freight and passenger service from 1911 to 1979, it is undergoing work intended to return it to passenger service by 2026.

History

The tunnel was built between 1908 and 1911 by the

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (also known as the DL&W or Lackawanna Railroad) was a U.S. Class 1 railroad that connected Buffalo, New York, and Hoboken, New Jersey (and by ferry with New York City), a distance of . Incorporated in ...

(DL&W) as part of the Lackawanna Cut-Off, an immense, spare-no-expense project intended to create the straightest, flattest route practicable for its main line through the mountains of northwestern New Jersey. The contractor was David W. Flickwir of Roanoke, Virginia. Originally, the DL&W had planned to have a cut, not a tunnel, at this location. At deep, it would have been the deepest on the Cut-Off. But in October 1909, anticlinal rock was encountered, described as "bastard

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...

", which contractors said was "so brittle and soft that you could scoop it up by the handful. It was white in color and looked much like Roquefort cheese." The fear was that this decayed rock could not be relied upon to provide sufficiently rigid support for a cut. As a result, Assistant Chief Engineer Wheaton recommended to President Truesdale that a tunnel be drilled instead, and Truesdale concurred, with work to bore a tunnel starting in December 1909. Ultimately, some 35,000 cubic yards of material were removed to create the bore. Roseville Tunnel opened on December 24, 1911, and permitted a 70 mph (113 km/h) speed limit. In 1958, the DL&W single-tracked the line in anticipation of a merger with the

Erie Railroad The Erie Railroad was a railroad that operated in the northeastern United States, originally connecting New York City — more specifically Jersey City, New Jersey, where Erie's Pavonia Terminal, long demolished, used to stand — with Lake Er ...

. Its successor, the

Erie Lackawanna Railway The Erie Lackawanna Railway , known as the Erie Lackawanna Railroad until 1968, was formed from the 1960 merger of the Erie Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The official motto of the line was "The Friendly Service Route" ...

(EL), shifted the remaining track in the tunnel several feet north to boost clearance for high-and-wide railroad cars. Conrail assumed operations of the EL in 1976, but ended service on the Cut-Off in January 1979. The railroad pulled up the tracks in mid-1984, having beaten off a protracted effort to prevent the rail from being removed, and later sold the right-of-way to two land developers. The State of New Jersey acquired the right-of-way in 2001; ten years later, NJ Transit began to rebuild the line as part of the

Lackawanna Cut-Off Restoration Project The Lackawanna Cut-Off Restoration Project is a New Jersey Transit and Amtrak effort to restore passenger service to the Lackawanna Cut-Off in northwest New Jersey. Begun in 2011 and underway as of 2022, the project's Phase 1 is meant to exten ...

Rockslides

Rockslide detector on Lackawanna Cut-Off - 1988

New Jersey geology makes

rockslide A rockslide is a type of landslide caused by rock failure in which part of the bedding plane of failure passes through compacted rock and material collapses ''en masse'' and not in individual blocks. Note that a rockslide is similar to an avalanc ...

s, which can derail trains, a constant threat in deep cuts. After the Cut-Off was closed for a month by a 1941 slide in Armstrong Cut just west of

Johnsonburg Johnsonburg is a borough in Elk County, Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh and south of Buffalo, New York, in a productive farming and lumbering region. Paper mills were once common in the borough, with the Domtar mill still operating. In 19 ...

, DL&W brought in heavy equipment to lessen the slope on the cut's northern side, making it nearly impossible for another rockslide to occur there. But Roseville proved to be a different matter. Unless the Lackawanna was willing to close the line for a prolonged period, there was no way to safely scale back the tall, steep rockwalls through Colby Cut, the tunnel's western approach. Instead, after the Armstrong Cut Slide, the DL&W paid a shantyman to watch for fallen rocks at Roseville. A hand-thrown switch had already been installed in 1913 to allow trains to shift tracks if one were blocked by fallen rocks, indicating that the railroad was acutely aware of the potential threat from almost the very beginning. In later years (probably around 1950), electronic detectors were installed that could automatically set trackside

signals In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...

to red if rocks broke through the detector fencing. In the 1970s, a concrete lining was applied to the westernmost 133 feet (41 m) of the tunnel to prevent rockfalls inside. This work did not prevent chunks of rock from dislodging later on, after the abandonment of the Cut-Off.

Rehabilitation for Andover service

In 2011,

New Jersey Transit New Jersey Transit Corporation, branded as NJ Transit, and often shortened to NJT, is a state-owned public transportation system that serves the U.S. state of New Jersey, along with portions of New York State and Pennsylvania. It operates bu ...

received approval to re-lay 7.3 miles (11.8 km) of track from Port Morris Junction through the tunnel in order to open commuter rail service westward to

Andover, New Jersey Andover is a borough in Sussex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2020 United States Census, the borough's population was 595, down slightly from 606 in the 2010 census, It also includes replacing two culverts: the one at Hudson Farm culvert, about 500 feet upstream from the Andover Station site; and Junction Brook culvert at the future station. The work is to be completed within 750 days (two years + 20 days) starting in late 2022. The re-opening of the line to Andover is projected to occur by 2026.

Notes

References

* *''The Lackawanna Railroad in Northwestern New Jersey'' by Larry Lowenthal and William T. Greenberg, Jr., Tri-State Railway Historical Society, Inc., 1987. *''Farewell to the Lackawanna Cut-Off'' (Parts I-IV), by Don Dorflinger, published in the ''Block Line'', Tri-State Railway Historical Society, Inc., 1984–1985.

External links

2006 photos of Roseville Tunnel
{{New Jersey Transit Rail Railroad tunnels in New Jersey NJ Transit Rail Operations Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad tunnels Conrail Erie Lackawanna Railway Tunnels completed in 1911 Lackawanna Cut-Off Underground commuter rail