As a nice primer to the era, today I present a Harlem Line employee timetable from 1878, covering the area from Grand Central to Mott Haven. By this time the Harlem’s street-running trains (many still pulled by horses) in lower Manhattan had become a separate and distinct service, and the Hudson and New Haven had been united with the Harlem in the first Grand Central. You’ll see references to the Spuyten Duyvil and Port Morris Junction, or what we’re more familiar with as Mott Haven Junction today. The story of the SD&PM will figure prominently in our upcoming articles, but the short explanation is that it provided the integral link that brought the Hudson River Railroad into Grand Central Depot, beginning the process of launching that road into prominence, and relegating the Harlem on its own tracks (case in point, when the electric division was established, Grand Central to Mott Haven became part of the Hudson, with the Harlem “starting” beyond that point).

While seeing the times of trains is certainly fascinating, the gold is really in the rules of the road. From Hudson being identified by the color yellow, and the Harlem by green, to the antiquated signaling rules, there’s plenty of delightful little tidbits to find throughout. Roger had not made his big debut yet, it was okay to acknowledge with simply an “all right.” And detonating signals, or torpedoes, served a real purpose beyond sticking them on the rail to celebrate an old timer’s retirement (this yougin’ may have just dated herself…).

Take a read, and let us know in the comments which rules of the road you find most interesting!

One of my goals for the year is to scan a lot of my collection, and share it with you – on Sundays. The items I upload here will eventually be archived in SmartCat as well, hence the name, SmartCat Sundays. Hopefully a lot of the items I have you will find as interesting as I do! Today’s example is a short booklet printed by the New York Central for employees on how to have proper manners and be courteous. As a graphic designer, I found the illustrations sort of comical. But the piece also shows a little bit of the mindset of the company before its downfall. But perhaps, it was a foreshadowing of that which was to come

In the long run, it is the traveling and shipping public that writes our pay checks and provides us with the opportunity to win security and advancement. That is why building good public relations is a job for us all. It’s the best insurance for our jobs!

In SmartCat you will find scans of over 300 artifacts related to the Harlem Line, ranging from 1857 to today. All items are tagged for easier browsing, and the system has a built-in search engine – an important upgrade from the old archives. The overwhelming majority of the artifacts currently available in SmartCat are timetables and postcards. Right now, only the covers of the timetables are scanned. Although it will be a massive undertaking, I hope to scan the insides of some of these timetables and make them available as well.

I’m going to quit talking about SmartCat – because you really need to be checking it out for yourself. You can use the below “guide” to the system, or click here to view everything.

SmartCat Search

View all archived items

In honor of the new catalog I thought it would be fun to show some of the earliest timetables that I have in the collection. The first is from 1871, when Cornelius Vanderbilt was still president of what was known as the New York and Harlem Railroad, with his son William Henry as vice president.

Note the first station is 26th Street, the first Grand Central Depot was only opened later in the year. At the time of publication Hartsdale was still known as Hart’s Corners, Hawthorne as Unionville, and Craryville as Bain’s. Bedford did not have the “Hills” added yet, and Purdey’s was the spelling used, as opposed to today’s Purdy’s.

The timetables below are from 1890, 1909 and 1914. The center timetable, from 1909, is important historically because at this time Grand Central Terminal was being constructed, as the older Depot was being demolished. Despite that, train service still needed to go on interrupted, and a temporary platform at Lexington Avenue was used. The timetable makes note of this on the front, directing riders to the temporary terminal.

Name evolution: After the New York and Harlem Railroad was leased to the New York Central, it was listed as the Harlem Division of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. Later the name was shortened to just the New York Central.

The timetables above are from 1922, 1931 and 1940 and list service to Lake Mahopac, a branch of the Harlem that diverged at Golden’s Bridge. Below are timetables from 1958 and 1964. Service on the Mahopac branch was discontinued in 1959, and so the timetable from 1958 is one of the last to list that service.

Not long after that 1964 timetable the New York Central merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad to form the Penn Central. Although the service was not the best, in my opinion the Penn Central had some of the nicer timetables in the collection. But that is a post for another Friday. Enjoy the day, and the weekend everyone!

As an additional note, I thank the Danbury Railway Museum’s library for giving me access to their collection of timetables to digitize. If anyone out there has some timetables that I don’t have listed, I would love it if you could contact me and send me a scan so I can add it into the catalog.

I was curious to know the fate of this man after the events of the wreck. He was put on trial for manslaughter for the deaths in the wreck, but was ultimately acquitted. I can only imagine the emotional toll this all took on him. From the start of the whole ordeal, he was blamed for the wreck. Newspapers questioned his experience as an engineer. He was even held in jail for a short time.

This was a gruesome crash. Newspapers described some victims as boiling to death from the steam of the engine. Telescoping is a term that you don’t ever want to hear in a sentence alongside anything having to do with rails. Imagine a collapsible telescope, and how the tubes slide into one another to become smaller. Now imagine the same thing in a rail collision: the force causes the cars to collapse into one another, one car sliding inside the others, resulting in heavy casualties.

In 1903 Wisker’s trial began, and later on that week he himself testified about the unsafe conditions of his locomotive. On April 25th, Wisker was acquitted. The emotional toll on the man was clearly evident as the jury read the verdict. He was described as “on the verge of nervous collapse” and “he trembled so violently that he had to be helped to his feet by [his lawyer]”. “He is but a shadow of the big sturdy fellow who was arrested the day of the fatal collision in the Park avenue tunnel.”

It would be nice to know that this man lived a long and productive life after this ordeal. However, in 1909, a work-related accident claimed John M. Wisker’s life. He was age 40. At least he lived long enough to see the beginnings of electric service, and the start of construction on the new Grand Central, both results of the crash in 1902.

To kick it all off, I thought it may be interesting to post about the 1902 Park Avenue Tunnel wreck. Trains today are relatively safe, however in the past there were many dangers, and many people died over the course of history…

Above are just some of the headlines of newspaper articles now in the Historical Archives. On January 8th 1902 the worst train wreck in New York City’s history occurred underground in the Park Avenue Tunnel. The tunnel had originally been built in 1876 to make Manhattan safer by removing the tracks from aboveground. However low visibility in the darkness, and especially the smoke from coal-burning locomotives, made the tunnel quite hazardous. This was not the first wreck in the tunnel: accidents had occurred in 1891, where six people were killed, and 1882, where two people lost their lives.

At first, the engineer John M. Wisker was blamed for the accident. He had missed several signals, and he was controlling the train that slammed into the train in front of it. Ultimately, Wisker was acquitted – the dangers and low visibility in the tunnel was to blame for the crash. Fifteen people died as an immediate result of the crash, and several others died in the hospital shortly after. The deaths, however, were not in vain: they provided the final push for electric service on the line, and led to the replacement of Grand Central Depot. It was reborn as the Grand Central Terminal that we know today, and opened in 1913. The first regular service on the new electrified line ran to White Plains in 1910, an article of which also appears in the archive.

If you are interested in learning more about the Park Avenue Tunnel Wreck of 1902, and the influence on Grand Central, you should certainly check out Grand Central, a part of PBS’s American Experience, which is viewable online.

If you are an astute observer, you may have noticed several weeks ago that a new link appeared over on the right of the site, entitled the Harlem Line Historical Archives. Basically, I thought it would be kind of cool to scan a bunch of my old collected timetables, and to put up my digital collection of timetables (most of them I do not have hard copies of). Now that the collection online has over 40 pieces, mostly timetables, as well as a few maps, I thought I would sort of “announce” it. And now you will notice, there is now an image on the right side of the site referencing the archives.

Anyways, note that this is a work in progress. Currently you can view the archives only by chronological order. In the future I’d like to implement additional features, so you can search the archives by viewing thumbnail images, or by keywords. Keyword searching is only partially implemented, I can keyword entries from the back-end, but as of currently, you can’t really search through the keywords (although some may show up in the tag cloud on the lower right of the site). I suppose it is an interesting challenge for myself, because I’ve already had to write some minor things in PHP to get the collection working as it is (such as the handy previous and next links you get while viewing pages).

Outside of learning a bit of PHP for myself, the other thing I love is looking at all this printed material in chronological order. And the way the timetables have evolved visually over the years, from the New York & Harlem days, to New York Central, Penn Central and beyond. My personal favorites are the two Penn Central timetables above, both from the late 1960’s, with the groovy typography. It would be awesome in the future to acquire a timetable for every year, and to do a timetable evolution video or something. Which just reminded me, if you have any timetables, maps, items of interest that you digital versions of and would like to donate/share/let me use, please let me know… especially if they are from a year that I don’t currently have.

Enter the Harlem Line Historical Archives

PS- I swear, I am working on something really awesome for the site. Another little mini-project. Here is a hint: it is a flash based mini-game. If you do not see it by the end of the week, I urge you to harass me about it, and when the heck I am going to be finishing it.