The Wallkill Valley Railroad is a defunct railroad which once operated in Ulster and Orange counties in upstate New York. Its corridor was from Kingston in the north to Montgomery in the south, with a leased extension to Campbell Hall. It crossed both the Wallkill River and Rondout Creek.
The railroad was founded in 1866 and ceased regular service in 1977. Throughout its history, the Wallkill Valley Railroad was owned by a variety of companies, including the West Shore and New York Central railroads, as well as Conrail. After its closure, portions of the rail bed were purchased by municipalities along the corridor and were converted to rail trails.
The Wallkill Valley Railway was founded in 1866, and was constructed to match the Erie Railroad's six-foot gauge so that it would be easier to transport goods from one railroad to the other. It was operated by the Erie for the next ten years after its construction. It came to New Paltz in 1870, and bridged Rondout Creek and the Delaware and Hudson Canal in 1872. That year, steamboat Captain Thomas Cornell became president of the railroad, though people thought that he bought the railroad just for his own sake. He completed it to Kingston, but left his post soon thereafter. Newspaper articles suggested that it was a financial scandal, and the Wallkill Valley went bankrupt.
However, Cornell purchased it again in 1877, with the name being amended to the Wallkill Valley Railroad. He learned later, with the help of his son-in-law Samuel Decker Coykendall, that the West Shore Railroad was chartering a route to New York City and that the new route would pass through Kingston on the way. Cornell responded by chartering an extension for the Wallkill Valley right into West Shore-chartered land. What this meant to the West Shore was that it could have a new branch. The West Shore purchased the line at a price of almost $1,000,000 in 1881.
The line soon became the rural Wallkill Valley Branch of the West Shore Railroad, although the locals whose profits were wiped out during the previous bankruptcy did not agree with this. An occasional scheme was hatched to extend it to the Pennsylvania coal mines to bring more money to the railroad, though it was never successful. The New York Central then bought the West Shore Railroad in 1884 when passenger service was slowly declining, as with other rural branches. The southern terminus of the railroad was at Montgomery.[1] The service from Montgomery to Campbell Hall was the beginning of the Erie Railroad's route from Montgomery to Erie's mainline at Goshen.[2] Passenger service was completely abandoned in 1937.
After the abandonment of passenger service some of the former Ulster and Delaware locomotives were sent to operate on the Wallkill Valley Branch, since they were light enough to cross the Wallkill Valley's Rosendale Bridge. Those locomotives were all gone by 1949 and the branch was entirely dieselized, together with the NYC's Catskill Mountain Branch. [3]