The answer to the question would be a few feet from where you are standing. "Beesley's Point Secondary" is the name of the railroad track route which goes through Magnolia along Atlantic Avenue, and through towns to the northwest, all of the way to Camden, and through towns to the southeast, all of the way to Beesley's Point, at the shore, in northern Cape May County.
The original railroad line going through Magnolia along Atlantic Avenue, the Philadelphia & Atlantic City Railway (P&ACR), was incorporated in 1876, and the track bed and original narrow-guage rails (closer together than today's standard guage rails) were laid in only ninety (90) days, in April, May, June and July, 1877.
Only one (1) year later, the P&ACR was in bankruptcy! Two railroads, the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Philadelphia & Reading Railway, picked the railroad up "for a song" -- $1,000,000 -- in 1883. They immediately ripped-up the old track and laid-down new track along the valuable right-of-way, converting the line from narrow guage to standard guage rails so that the railway was compatible with other railroads, and so within a little more than a year they were able to connect the Camden-to-shore line at Winslow to a railroad serving Vineland and the Delaware Bay shore, and by 1885 the line was so profitable that Philadelphia & Reading Railway -- later the Reading Railroad -- was able to buy a controlling interest in Central Railroad of New Jersey Railroad itself, and therefore that company's rights in the railroad between Camden and the shore and Camden and the bay.
An 1884 map of railroad lines serving Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York shows Magnolia to be the first stop on the line from Camden to the shore.
From an 1884 map of railroad lines in the mid-Atlantic
states. The line through Magnolia is the dark green line
running from the upper left to the lower right. Note that in 1884, Magnolia was the first stop outside Camden on the way to the shore.
In the early 1930s, as the Depression took its grave toll on American business, the Reading began buying one southern New Jersey railway line after the other, and ultimately, in 1933, consolidated with the Pennsylvania Railroad lines in southern New Jersey to survive the Depression, with the Pennsylvania Railroad having a 2/3 interest, the Reading Railroad a 1/3 interest. The system, which included the tracks going through Magnolia, was christened the "Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Line."
The Delaware River Bridge, which had been completed in 1926, and the American automobile, and busing and trucking industries, proved to be stakes in the Seashore Line's financial heart. In 1976, Conrail purchased the financially-ailing-but-still-surviving line from the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads.
By that time, the Camden-to-the-shore railroad line through Magnolia had been joined by new track to an electrical generating station opened at Beesley's Point in northern Cape May County, across the bay from Ocean City, since 1963.
The line supplanted loss of passenger traffic income with huge and very lucrative shipments of anthracite coal from Pennsylvania mines to the Beesley's Point generating station for decades. The low-pollution, high-cost anthracite coal shipments represented what initially was considered to be an environmentally sound balancing act.
It was one of those coal shipments that is the subject of this blog item.
I couldn't find verification of the following incident in National Transportation Safety Board records or in the news. But I swear it happened. I was there ...
My wife and I moved into our Magnolia home on Warwick Road and Jackson Avenue in March of 1982. We married in October of the same year at St. Gregory's Church. Our son Josh was born in October, 1983.
I was at home one day with my wife and our son, probably between July 1, 1984 and June 30, 1985, as near as I can remember, when the house shook and we heard a load bang.
I ran outside to the street, to see if I could see smoke from an explosion rising into the sky anywhere, when I noticed that something was wrong down Warwick Road at the grade crossing -- I saw a great wall of black, and cars stopped in front of it. "A train," I thought, "But there's something wrong with it."
One of our neighbors came north up Warwick Road in his car and turned into Jackson Avenue. Seeing me he yelled, "Pete! One of the coal trains has derailed up at Warwick Road!"
I loaded my son Josh into his stroller and pushed him at a fast pace down Jackson Avenue across Camden Avenue and down to Atlantic Avenue, and there it was, on the portion of the track between Evesham and Warwick Roads -- a long coal train that had been moving southbound with a full load of coal for Beesley's Point, with several hopper cars off the tracks, some of them laying on their side on and off the track, like great dinosaurs whose end had come.
As I pushed Josh in his stroller closer to the scene of the accident, I saw that the derailed hopper cars began a few cars from the rear of the train, around W. Monroe Avenue, south all of the way to Warwick Road, itself. The train spanned the Warwick Road crossing, so that several non-derailed hopper cars and the diesel-powered engines were actually on the other side of Warwick Road into Somerdale. Enormous loads of coal spilled from the overturned hopper cars were strewn everywhere, mostly on the stretch of track from W. Adams Avenue to the Warwick Road grade crossing. Some of the piles even spread onto Atlantic Avenue.
I wasn't surprised. Whenever I pushed Josh in his stroller down to the tracks as a train was passing by, I frequently saw the rails sink an inch or so under the weight of their loads down into their shoes on the railroad ties, as the railroad spikes were gradually squeezed out of the railroad ties by the elements. And, many of the railroad ties had turned grey and cheesy-looking.
Additionally, in February, 1984, I heard that another coal train on the Beesley point Secondary, moving an empty coal train northbound on the Beesley Point Secondary from the power station toward Magnolia had derailed.
http://thecrhs.org/image/view/6223/_original
In other words, the track was showing signs of age.
In the months following the messy derailment, Conrail invested in a massive rail maintenance campaign, to give the Secondary a few more generations of life. I enjoyed pushing Josh in his stroller down to the tracks, where even the railroad workers became familiar with Josh and waved to him.
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