User:Mackensen/Portland Secondary

The Portland Secondary is a railroad branch line which runs through the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is owned and operated by the Norfolk Southern Railway.

Route
The line is 22 mi long. At its south end it joins with the Norfolk Southern Lehigh Line in Easton, Pennsylvania. It then crosses the Delaware River for the first time at Phillipsburg, New Jersey, opposite Easton, and joins the Belvidere and Delaware River Railway. It follows the Delaware River for 7 mi before recrossing it at Brainards, New Jersey. The Roxburg Secondary diverges at this point. The line continues through northeastern Northampton County, Pennsylvania until reaching Portland, Pennsylvania, where it meets the Delaware–Lackawanna Railroad.

History
The lineage of the Portland Secondary is complicated, with parts descending from three different former Class I railroads: the Erie Lackawanna Railway, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway, and the Pennsylvania Railroad (via Penn Central). All three of these railroads, bankrupt in the 1970s, were merged into Conrail, at which point the current line was under unified management for the first time.

The oldest portion is the line from Phillipsburg to Brainards, which was constructed by the Belvidere Delaware Railroad (Bel-Del) between 1851–1855. The Bel-Del was leased by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1871 and remained part of the company until the creation of Conrail in 1976. The Pennsylvania, through subsidiaries, built a spur across the Delaware River from Brainards to Martins Creek, Pennsylvania in 1885.

The purpose of that spur was to meet the Bangor and Portland Railway. It opened between Bangor and Portland in 1880, and constructed a branch down to Martins Creek in 1885. The B&P became part of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (D&LW) in XXX, which in turn merged with the Erie Railroad in 1960 to form the Erie Lackawanna Railway.

The final portion of the current line is the bridge across the Delaware between Phillipsburg and Easton. This was built in 1890 by the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway (LHRR). The LHRR had built a route from near the Hudson River southeast to Belvidere, New Jersey, the northern end of the Bel-Del. From there the LHRR had trackage rights over the Bel-Del through Brainards to Phillipsburg, at which point it used its bridge to reach Easton.

All three railroads were included in Conrail, a government corporation formed to salvage railroads in the Northeast United States.