O. & W.; The Long Life and Slow Death of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway

Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1959. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. xiii, [1], 211, [3] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. Roster of Equipment. Bibliography. Two fold-outs in rear pocket. DJ worn, torn, soiled and chipped. Edges soiled. In notation on fep. Helmer was born on November 12, 1926, in Oneida, NY. Bill earned an A.A.S. in Auto Mechanics at Morrisville Agricultural & Technical Institute and a B.A. at the New York State College for Teachers at Albany. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Old English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Bill had a lifelong fascination with railroading and wrote two railroad histories: O&W: The Long Life and Slow Death of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway (1959), considered a classic in the genre, and Rip Van Winkle Railroads (1970), deemed to be a definitive history of railroading in the northern Catskills. Bill was featured in the documentary, Rails to the Catskills. He had extraordinary knowledge about Upstate New York history and his ancestors who settled in the Mohawk Valley in the 1700s. The New York, Ontario and Western Railway, more commonly known as the O&W or NYO&W, was a regional railroad with origins in 1868, lasting until March 29, 1957 when it was ordered liquidated by a US bankruptcy judge. It was the first notable U.S. railroad with its mainline entirely abandoned. The railroad began life as the New York and Oswego Midland Railroad, organized by Dewitt C. Littlejohn in 1868. Its mainline extended from Weehawken, New Jersey, in the greater New York City area to Oswego, New York, a port city on Lake Ontario. It had branch lines to Scranton, Pennsylvania; Kingston, New York; Port Jervis, New York; Monticello, New York; Delhi, New York; Utica, New York and Rome, New York. The part south of Cornwall, New York, was operated over the New York Central Railroad's West Shore Railroad via trackage rights.