Passenger Season Begins with NY Central Historical Society

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On Saturday, April 18, you will see the Finger Lakes Railway passenger coaches Coach #7601 "Seneca”: © Ed Postrunning the old New York Central corridor from Canandaigua to Solvay with over 100 passengers from the New York Central Historical Society onboard. Society members are staying 2 nights at the Geneva Ramada Lakefront Hotel, and FGLK President, Mike Smith, is speaking at their conference dinner Saturday evening.

Train consist will be one FGLK locomotive, TBA, and three former Via Rail passenger coaches, now the FGLK 7602 (Canandaigua), 7601 (Cayuga), and 7202 (Seneca).

 Starting at 7:30am, passenger will park their vehicles at Geneva Station, a.k.a. the Depot 25 RestaurantShops at the Station on Railroad Ave, and board a bus headed for Canandaigua. Buses will deliver 104 passengers to the boarding location at Pleasant St. in Canandaigua. At 9am, the train departs, heading northeast to Shortsville and the Depot 25 restaurant and the Lehigh Valley Historical Society Museum.

At 9:30am, there will be a short layover at the museum and a photo run-by, time and weather permitting. Box lunches for the trip are provided by the Depot 25 restaurant while the Lehigh Valley Museum, ironically housed in an old NYCRR freight depot, will be open for viewing.

From there the train will head east to Clifton Springs, where there will be another short layover provided for folks to see the old freight and passenger depots, beautifully restored in Clifton Springs. Now a the Public Library and Storage facility, the village showcases its part of the railroad history. [Continued]

Next stop, back at Geneva Station where passengers will become intermodal, again, and drive their vehicles less than a mile to the headquarters of FGLK in order to reboard the train and continue their journey east. The train will meet them down the tracks, but passengers are not allowed to travel that distance onboard the train beacause .7 miles of the mainline track is still owned by Norfolk Southern.

Once onboard again at the Geneva Yard, the train will head east, passing through Waterloo and Seneca Falls, where old depots and historical remnants of the NYC era still stand. East of Seneca Falls, the tracks parallel, then cross the Seneca River, only to meet water again on the one-mile causeway over the north end of Cayuga Lake.

After passing Harris Park, a lake and track side community park in Cayuga, the trainAlco 8223: © Matt Langworthy will continue east to the City of Auburn. Auburn was the fundamental start place for the old Auburn & Rochester and Auburn & Syracuse Railroads which later merged to from the NY Central. Passengers will pass by the former Lehigh Valley round house and the nearby Bombardier factory, which was formerly a locomotive manufacturing plant owned by Alco after 1929. They introduced the commonly used "hi-hood" model from this location.

Following Auburn, the Skaneatles Junction station still stands in Elbridge, which is now home to the Central NY Model Railroad Club & Historical Society. This was a passenger station for the NY Central, which also interchanged with the previous 1836 Skaneatles and Jordan RR and ran passengers to and from Skaneatles Lake.

Martisco DepotJust down the tracks in Martisco, the train will stop at Martisco Depot, circa 1870, which also interchanged passengers with the former Marcellus Otisco Lake Railway, which ran trips to and from Otisco Lake.

From there, the train will travel the final 30 minutes to industrial Solvay, where the train will terminate near the end of track for FGLK. Passengers will reboard buses and return to Geneva for their annual dinner.

"We are pleased with the turn out and the intinerary," states NY Central Historical Society member, and trip organizer, Dr. Howard Fine.