I Walk the Line

On Sunday, November 8, I had another chance to meet with Mike Kudish (see my blog entry for May 12), who has been researching the railroads in and around the Catskills, as he has already done in the Adirondacks.

Today we walked three segments of the rail bed for a railroad that would have brought the trains into Bovina. The Delaware Railroad Company was founded in 1898 to connect Andes and Delhi, with a spur to Bovina. The main use of the railroad would have been for transporting milk from the Bovina creamery. After maybe about a year of preliminary construction, the project was abandoned. This likely was caused by a combination of the economic downturn that hit the country just around the turn of the century and the use of trucks to transport milk.

Finding the rail bed in the vicinity of the Bovina creamery has proven challenging. During Mike's hike last spring, he found what appeared to be a rail bed but it was too far up the bank to have allowed a train to get to the creamery. He now thinks this bed is just a farming road. We aren't sure, but we think we did find a rail bed at a lower level that would have brought trains to the creamery.

Then we drove to Route 28 to find another section of rail bed by a ravine that some maps call the Bovina Gorge, not too far from the Clarence Burns farm. As Mike pointed out, it's no gorge, just a ravine. It is where Silver Lake drains down to the Little Delaware. The rail bed comes to the ravine, where it would have needed a trestle for the train to cross it.

From the ravine, we walked a ways up Route 28 towards Andes. We climbed up the bank not too far from the turn off for Tunis Lake. There we found a trail that was marked on a topo map from the 60s as a hiking trail. This turns out to have been the rail bed for the line that was to run from Andes to Delhi (the trail is not heavily used since it all goes through private property, we think). We hiked that toward Delhi until we found a newly dug pond (two actually) where a development is being planned. It was right above Burgin road where my car was parked, so it worked out well.

Mike still wants to find where the Bovina line was to have met up with the Andes/Delhi line. We think we identified the spot and also suspect the bed for that part was never constructed, but we need to make another visit - hopefully next spring - to find that and to walk the bed further along towards Delhi. So stay tuned for the further adventures of the Delaware Railroad Company.