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

The Ontario & Western (the O&W), or, as both boosters and detractors referred to it in its later years, the “Old & Weary,” operated from 1869 to 1957. It ran from Oswego on Lake Ontario to New York City, passing through the midlands and southern counties of New York State. It had spurs to Utica, Kingston, Port Jervis, and Scranton, PA.

Filled with colorful characters and miscellaneous machinery, O&W chronicles almost a century of alternating hope and heartache, prosperity and poverty, dignity and degradation. Her passing was mourned for economic and sentimental reasons, but the loss was deeply felt in an intangible way. The rambling, elderly, inefficient, accident-prone, irritating old railroad was part of a way of life now gone from the American scene.

Softcover, 232 pages, with a trim size of 6 x 8 ¾ inches and 140 black-and-white images. Published by Black Dome Press in 2000. ISBN 9781883789251

“Professor William Helmer’s work is deserving of the widest possible circulation, for he has written not of O&W alone but of all American railroading throughout an age when train time was a social event.” ~Train Magazine