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New Haven Line Overview
THE NEW HAVEN LINE BEGAN AS THE
NEW YORK & NEW HAVEN RAILROAD in the early 1800s. In 1872, the
NY & NH was merged with the Hartford and New Haven Railroad to
form the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.
In about 1900, steam locomotion was the order of the day.
However, dirty coal smoke, soot and steam were making an
absolutely unimaginable mess in the underground Grand Central
Terminal and a New York City 1903 law outlawed their use in the
terminal after July 1st 1908.So, while the New York Central
System and the New York and Harlem were content to use DC third
rail, and have engine changes to convert trains, the New Haven
Railroad was slightly more ambitious and pragmatic.They decided
that it would be more practical over long distances to use
overhead AC powered wire (called catenary) to supply electricity
to their trains, a pioneering idea for the time. To do this,
they draped wires in pairs which would hold up a single
trolley wire,and thin pipes connecting all three wires
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New Haven Photos Page |
This
formed a system of triangles, varying in size from very large
at the support structures, to very small in between. From the
Bronx, electrification reached Stamford in 1907. The system
looked like overhead art, very nice looking indeed. "They were
in such a rush" notes Jack W. Swanberg, a respected train
historian, "The whole thing was an experiment". The railroad
used the idea of triangular catenary to make the system rigid,
which they succeeded in doing, but it turned out that you
didn't want rigidity at all, you wanted flexibility. You see,
when the weather goes to extremes, steel and copper wire will
react. If it gets too hot, the wire will sag, and given the
right circumstances, e.g. a train switching tracks, the
sagging wire can get hooked on the bottom of a trains'
pantograph, thus causing the pantograph to rip down sections
of the wire. When this happens it is called an electrical arc,
which although not a danger to passengers, can be quite
frightening to the passengers on the train involved and will
leave that track out of commission. If the weather gets too
cold, the wires will contract. With assemblies that are too
rigid, the contracting wire will snap. (Modern systems have
weights at the ends, which go up or down depending on whether
the trolley wire contracts or expands). Because of these
problems, a new system was designed for use East of Stamford,
a two wire system which fared slightly better, (although not
as good as modern systems). Under this system, electrification
reached New Haven in 1914 and Danbury in 1925. All this proved
that AC power was the better way to power trains over longer
distances. Later on, the Danbury branch was to be dieselized,
when the New Haven railroad ran into difficulties, and about
that time, in the 1960s, the NHRR went under, similar to
general railroad experiences at the time, and similar to the
tech industry today - railroads had been over hyped for some
time, road, sea, and air transport became cheaper and more
practical. Penn Central, (a merger of the NY Central System
and the Pennsylvania RR) which took over the Line, itself went
bust about a decade later. Conrail took over Penn Central,
which at this point had owned all of what we now call
Metro-North, and after a few years decided it too wanted out
of the Northeast entirely. In 1981, Washington passed the
Northeast Railroad Transportation Act, which gave them the
clearance to do just that. Left holding the bag, the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority formed a quasi
independent agency, Metro-North Commuter Railroad, with the
Connecticut Department of Transportation into help with the
running of New Haven Line Services. ConnDOT now pays 2/3 of
the operating cost for the mainline, and all costs associated
with the three branches. They have done a real good job with
the line since then, rebuilding derelict parts of the railroad
by the Continuos Welded Rail standard (CWR), and complementing
the fleet of electric M-series M-2s with M4s, and in 1992,
M-6s, (although the procurement of the M-6s was an unmitigated
disaster).
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