Twenty-five Years on the ND&C: A History of the Newburgh, Dutchess & Connecticut Railroad

The earliest railroads in Dutchess County were the north-south routes that served New York City, Albany, and Montreal. These routes were relatively stable and successful. With that success as an incentive, an east-west railroad was chartered and built. The first eight years of east-west railroad operations in Dutchess County saw turmoil, conflict, and multiple financial failures.

The railroad tracks that ran from Dutchess Junction and Matteawan (Beacon) through Hopewell and Millbrook to Millerton and to Connecticut at State Line had several different names in their first few years of existence. Out of that chaos grew the Newburgh, Dutchess & Connecticut Railroad, the subject of a new book by Bernard Rudberg of Wappingers Falls published by Purple Mountain Press of Fleischmanns, NY.

The ND&C Railroad under the leadership of John Schultze and Charles Kimball established an operation that survived through good times and bad for over twenty-five years until it was absorbed into the Central New England Railway later becoming part of the New Haven Railroad. Still later, eleven miles of the old ND&C line became part of the ill-fated Penn Central, next Conrail, then the Housatonic Railroad, and currently Metro North.

Early sections of Twenty-five Years on the ND&C: A History of the Newburgh, Dutchess & Connecticut Railroad set the stage for the entrance of the new line. The heart of the book is the twenty-five years of ND&C operation from 1879 to 1904. Recently discovered ND&C record books now in the possession of the Beacon Historical Society (33,000 pages in 48 volumes) are a window into the everyday events and problems of running a railroad in the late 1800s. This remarkable resource contains everything from compensating farmers for cattle run over by trains to dealing with the great blizzard of March 1888, as well as ordering locomotive repair parts or reporting the office washroom drain is clogged again. After spending more than a year of spare time reading the books, the author came to think of Schultze and Kimball as old friends even though both have been gone for over 100 years.

The author conveys the human side of the struggle to build a successful business and preserves the contributions that Schultze, Kimball, and the railroads made to the world we live in today.