New Jersey West Line Railroad

It was speculated that the Passaic Valley and Peapack were being manipulated as part of some larger plan, but money for the road had been raised by the common procedure of selling bonds to investors in the towns along the line, so ostensibly it was under local control.As part of the plan Packer began buying shorefront land in Perth Amboy for a coal port that he said would be reached by a branch line.To varying degrees this part was graded, bridge abutments were built, wooden trestles were installed, and portions of track may have been laid.A 1907 DL&W survey of the right of way from Newark to West Summit (now Murray Hill) is maintained on the U.S. National Park Service website.[1] In Summit, the crossing of the Morris and Essex was at a point south of Kent Place Boulevard and west of High Street.Crossing Kent Place Boulevard, the NJWL alignment ran through what is now school grounds (the current location of Summit High School), across Morris Avenue, and behind the houses on the south side of Bedford Road, where it is a public easement and marked on Summit's tax map as "FORMER NJ WESTLINE R.R."Short Hills was developed starting in 1874, right after the New Jersey West Line failed, so its street plan bears almost no relation to the path of the railroad.It then would have gone north to run along the south side of Western Drive, which was named for the NJWL with a station location around Taylor Place or Highland Avenue.It ran southeast following generally Vauxhall Road and crossed the river into Hillside near Brookside Avenue, Union, where there were traces of a bridge abutment.The operating segment of the New Jersey West Line did not have enough income to pay its costs, as it served small farms and an undeveloped region, and the company fell into receivership in 1878.The Gladstone Branch was converted to electric passenger operation in January 1931, but freights continued to run on steam until dieselization in March, 1953.The usual off-peak service for about six decades in the mid-20th Century consisted of a pair of Gladstone cars that were cut in and out of mainline Morris and Essex trains at Summit.The line was amazingly rural in nature, consisting of a single main track with passing sidings and hand-thrown switches worked by train crews.