The Bridge is Still There, But not the Tracks

The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (after many years of building, buying, merging and leasing railroads) had a direct link to the Great Lakes. The city of Elmira, New York must have been included in this expansion to Lake Erie. That is where the picture on the front of this post card was taken.

Sadly, that bridge is no longer used by any railroad. If you go to this website you will see that it is part of a hiking trail today. There is one picture in the file that looks like it was taken from the same spot as the picture on the front of this post card. https://bridgehunter.com/category/city/elmira-new-york/ For the story about the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad go to this website: https://www.american-rails.com/dlw.html That is where I picked up this story, below. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western was another of the Northeast's many anthracite carriers with a history tracing back to the early 19th century. During the company's height it never reached 1,000 miles in size but was nevertheless a well-managed company throughout its corporate history. As a result, it avoided bankruptcy from the time of its formation (early 1850s) until its merger with the Erie more than a century later. The "Road Of Anthracite's" entire network only stretched roughly 950 miles but the Lackawanna was a finely tuned operation with a diverse traffic base and highly skilled railroaders, from top to bottom, that kept it humming along. It weathered the financial panics of 1873 and 1893 and even the Great Depression of 1929. However, its closest brush with bankruptcy did occur during the 1930s, under the leadership of John Davis. It seems that most of the classic railroads of New England and the Northeast can trace their heritage back to an entity predating the industry. Such was the case for the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western whose earliest predecessor was the Hoboken Ferry Company. The Lackawanna's two earliest railroad predecessors were the Liggetts Gap Railroad, incorporated on April 7, 1832 and the Delaware & Cobbs Gap Railroad, chartered on December 4, 1850. On April 14, 1851, the company changed its name as the Lackawanna & Western Railroad and later that year, on October 20, 1851, service was opened between both towns. The Lackawanna gained its official name on March 11, 1853 when the L&W merged with the Delaware & Cobbs Gap forming the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The DL&W at this time ran diagonally across Pennsylvania and enjoyed lucrative sources of freight from iron ore deposits and anthracite coal located within the Lackawanna Valley. With the DL&W's eastern network largely complete it now looked to the west and an extension to Buffalo; reaching this port town along the eastern tip of Lake Erie would mean the railroad no longer needed to rely on its rival, the Erie Railroad, to ferry its freight westward.

The post card was published by a company that was based in Elmira, New York. It was published by the Rubin Brothers. Harry Rubin, and his brother Ike, formerly printers at the Elmira Star Gazette, the first Gannett newspaper, open Rubin’s Newsstand. A wholesale distribution operation, known as Rubin Brothers News, begins in the basement on East Water St. in Elmira, New York. Most wholesale business is newspapers. Few magazines published for distribution at this time. New York Times and other newspapers arrive on trains.