Central Railroad of New Jersey HO Scale Models

The Central Railroad of New Jersey, commonly called the Jersey Central, traced its origins to the Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad, incorporated in 1831 and opened for horse-drawn service between Elizabethport and Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1836. Steam power replaced horses in 1839, and the line pushed westward to reach Somerville by early 1842. The successor Somerville and Easton Railroad absorbed the Elizabethtown and Somerville in 1849 and reorganized under the name Central Railroad Company of New Jersey. By 1852 the main line had reached Phillipsburg on the east bank of the Delaware River, and in 1864 the railroad extended eastward across Newark Bay to Jersey City, establishing the terminal that would serve as the railroad's principal passenger gateway for more than a century. Branches eventually fanned out across New Jersey to Flemington, Perth Amboy, Newark, and other points, while the railroad absorbed the New Jersey Southern in 1879, extending CNJ's reach across the lower part of the state toward the Delaware Bay shore. The railroad's ambitions extended well into Pennsylvania through the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, built by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and leased by the CNJ beginning in 1871. That line connected Phillipsburg with Wilkes-Barre, reaching Scranton in 1888, and its primary purpose was moving anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mining regions to tidewater markets. The coal trade was enormously profitable for decades, though it also made the CNJ heavily dependent on a single commodity. From 1883 to 1887 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad leased and operated the CNJ, and in 1901 the Reading Company, successor to that road, gained majority stock control of the Jersey Central. Around the same time, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad acquired control of the Reading, giving the B&O indirect access to New York Harbor over the combined Reading and CNJ network. The CNJ's passenger ambitions were represented most colorfully by the Blue Comet, a luxuriously appointed all-coach train inaugurated in 1929 between Jersey City and Atlantic City, painted entirely in blue and offering amenities well beyond the typical day coach of its era, though automobile competition forced its discontinuation in 1941. The postwar decades proved increasingly difficult for the Jersey Central. Passenger revenues shrank to almost entirely commuter traffic concentrated in two brief daily rushes, and the railroad's function as predominantly a terminal carrier left little margin for freight profit. New Jersey's tax burden consumed substantial revenue, and the anthracite trade that had sustained the Pennsylvania operations faded dramatically. CNJ operations in Pennsylvania effectively ended on March 31, 1972, and the railroad entered bankruptcy proceedings. The grand Jersey City terminal, once the embarkation point for ferries crossing to Manhattan, saw its ferry service end on April 30, 1967, after which CNJ commuter trains were rerouted to Newark via the Aldene Connection. When the Penn Central collapse rippled through the northeastern railroad industry, any remaining hope of a rescue merger evaporated along with it. Conrail assumed CNJ freight operations on April 1, 1976, incorporating much of the former Jersey Central infrastructure into its northeastern network. The main line west of Phillipsburg became part of Conrail's Lehigh Line, while commuter passenger services passed to the New Jersey Department of Transportation, eventually becoming elements of what New Jersey Transit would operate as the Raritan Valley Line and the North Jersey Coast Line. The CNJ corporate entity emerged from bankruptcy reorganization in 1979 as Central Jersey Industries, later renamed CJI Industries, which subsequently merged with the packaging firm Triangle Industries in 1986. The Newark Bay Bridge, once the railroad's vital link across the bay, had its lift spans demolished in 1980, a physical marker of the Jersey Central's passing from the American railroad landscape.