PORT JERVIS, A TOWN IN TRANSITION
By the City of Port Jervis, N.Y. with photos by Bob Mintz

ERIE TURNTABLE

TURN`TA`BLE noun. rotating platform with tracks for turning locomotives and cars around—Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary

The structure presented has a diameter of 115 feet and the bridge, or the part of the structure that holds the locomotive, is approximately 19 feet wide. Previously it was turned by two 40 horsepower, 440 volt, 3 phase electric motors that were powered from a connection at the top of the gantry. The most recent locomotive that was turned on it weighed 440 tons, or 880,000 pounds, fully loaded with water and coal.

It is the largest operating turntable in the United States. There are a number of other turntables in the region, including at least three in New Jersey, two in New England, two in New York, and four in Pennsylvania. Some of them are not operable and others are not in strategic locations where they can be used as this one is.

The first turntable used here in Port Jervis was built sometime before 1872. From at least 1872 until 1903 there were two turntables in the Erie yards and shops here. The second turntable was located slightly down the road. It was dismantled and is said to have been used as a bridge to cross the Erie Main Line at the end of Shin Hollow Road in Huguenot.

The bridge of this turntable probably dates to the early 1900s. It is believed that the bridge was enlarged in the 1930s when the 3300 series steam locomotives, also known as the Berkshires, were introduced on the Erie. The turning rail, or the circular piece of rail in the base of the pit, was last replaced by the Abeex Company of Chicago in 1948. Some repair work was done to the concrete in the 1940s.

It is believed that the turntable was last used in 1987 until the steam excursions were undertaken by Iron Horse Rambles in the fall of 1996. The remains of the roundhouse that surrounded the turntable was burned by an arsonist in 1987 and ordered demolished in 1988. Roundhouses were large structures used by the railroad in which steam engines were maintained.

The turntable and surrounding property is now owned and operated by the city of Port Jervis. The area around and including the turntable was renovated in 1996 with the generous assistance of many friends and donors including the Depot Preservation Society, which provided a substantial contribution. The Department of Public Works completed much of the site work along with the assistance from Otisville Correctional Facility and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

SHE’S A RAILROAD LADY

To understand the importance of this turntable, one must first understand the importance of the railroad and the great contribution it made to American economic and social history. The following statistics are required to realize the economic impact that the railroad had on Port Jervis and America during the last quarter of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. The decade of the 1880s saw the opening of some 93,000 miles of railroad track across the country, the greatest expansion ever to take place in the annals of railroading. The impact on thousands of towns was enormous and the nation enjoyed a tremendous period of prosperity because of economic expansion that it allowed. All along the lines new towns sprouted up and local economies flourished where just a few decades before nothing had existed.

The mail line trains of the Erie stopped in Port Jervis and it served as a division center between Jersey City, N.J. and Susquehanna, Pa. In 1922, 20 passenger trains passed through the city each day and six trains reached New York City before 10:30 a.m. A brochure describes it as “the place where through trains changed their engines.” Freight trains hauled anthracite coal into metropolitan regions.

PORT JERVIS: AT THE CROSSROADS

Since colonial times Port Jervis has been a central point in the region’s transportation network. The Old Mine Road, America’s first 100-mile road, was used here by Dutch settlers. With the opening of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the late 1820s, the village, named in honor of canal engineer John B. Jervis in 1826, began its meteoric rise as an economic center. The canal company laid out the original plan for the city, whose center was near present-day Canal and East Main Streets and the site of the canal’s basins. As a result, the city developed as a major stop on the Delaware and Hudson Canal.

The canal was constructed to ship anthracite coal from the Moosic Mountains in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania to the metropolitan New York City area and New England. After a run of 70 successful years it fell victim to the railroads. But during the first half of the company’s history, it dominated the region and its economy. Many of the village’s most important businessmen got their start working on the canal, supplying the canal company with items or shipping locally produced items on the canal.

The canal’s impact on the local economy would begin to be eclipsed with the arrival of the first Erie train in 1847.

THE END OF AN ERA

The economic heart of Port Jervis was tied to the railroad and as the railroad declined so did the local economy. The defining moment, in terms of the city’s more recent economic history, occurred in the late 1940s when the Erie railroad began the dieselization of its fleet. Diesel engines did not require the 70-mile stops that were needed during the steam era and in fact, diesel engines could travel many more miles between fuel and maintenance stops.

This changing technology not only impacted Port Jervis but hundreds of other railroad towns across America. In this region, town like Maybrook, New York, one of the great railroad centers in the Northeast, and Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, a division center and a sister city to Port Jervis, became ghost towns in a matter of decades. Middletown, once home to the Ontario and Western Railroad, crumbled when the railroad shut down in the late 1950s.

The number of men employed by the railroad in Port Jervis peaked in 1900 at about 2,500 men with a monthly payroll of $125,000. That number was gradually reduced to 900 in the 1940s and reduced again to 300 in 1960. It stands at less than 20 today. Port Jervis was a hotbed of union activity as it was the meeting place of the Delaware and New York divisions. The unions started here were among the earliest formed across the entire system.

Railroad employees were unionized and at the top of the pay scale for skilled workers and were a critical part of the region’s economy. Even as late as 1960 a considerable part of the city’s labor force was particularly skilled—44%--, which was much higher than Orange County or New York State.

Residents of the region, after a slight upturn in rail traffic during World War II, were increasingly left with three painful choices in terms of their future as the railroad’s operations were reduced from 1947 to 1953. The first choice was to stay in the region and work at lower paying jobs and in turn lower their economic, educational, cultural and intellectual expectations, a process now called downward mobility. The second option that only a certain portion of the railroaders had was to move with the railroad to its new center of operations in Hornell, New York. The final option was to simply move from the area altogether and make a new life elsewhere, something that a considerable number of people did as reflected in the declining population statistics.

“We had a good railroad here, a good bunch of me. They were interested in getting the trains out, all over the railroad.”—Harold Allen, Retired Erie Railroader

For further information about the turntable and future plans call the City of Port Jervis at (914) 858-4017.