User:Mitchazenia/Caldwell Branch

The Caldwell Branch was a former branch of the New York and Greenwood Lake Railroad in Essex and Passaic Counties in New Jersey. The line was also part of the Erie Railroad, which maintained the New York and Greenwood Lake Railroad. The branch split off from the Greenwood Lake mainline at Great Notch station and continued for several miles to the station at Essex Fells. At Essex Fells, trains continued as the Roseland Railway, another New York and Greenwood Lake subsidiary, which connected the line to the Morristown and Erie Railway nearly a mile away.

The line had only six train stations, four of which received passenger service until 1966, when service was terminated: Cedar Grove, Verona, Caldwell and Essex Fells. The station at Overbrook Hospital, dubbed Overbrook, last received passenger service in 1936 and Great Notch last saw passenger service in 2010, when New Jersey Transit shut down the station for good. The Caldwell Branch suffered a washout in July of 1975 just west of the Overbrook siding during a large storm, ending freight service on the line. The next year, on April 1, the Erie-Lackawanna Railway merged into the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), but the Caldwell Branch remained as part of the EL estate and was not conveyed to Conrail. The EL estate offered to sell the line to the Morristown & Erie Railway from Roseland to Great Notch, but that never came to fruition. In 1979, the tracks of the Caldwell Branch were torn up for good.

The line from Great Notch to Verona is now part of the West Essex Trail, a rail-trail using the former right-of-way. The only standing structure remaining to the Caldwell Branch is the freight station built in the late 19th century in Verona. The town of Verona is proposing the restoration of the structure, deeming it locally historical and possibly turning it into a one-room railroad museum.