Restoration and other PRR Projects of Local Interest 

From time to time we read articles about local PRR restoration projects ongoing in the Philadelphia Area.

Here we will present those items of interest to the PRR.

from the Courier Post, New Jersey

Cape May rail line picks up steam

By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
RIO GRANDE

Tony Macrie is no top-hatted robber baron with mansions in New York City and Newport, R.I.

He wears a ball cap and lives in Hammonton.

But the 47-year-old former radio producer and audio technician does have one thing in common with the likes of the legendary Cornelius Vanderbilt and Edward Henry Harriman.

He owns a railroad.

And he runs it in a hands-on manner that would have astounded the financiers who made fortunes assembling the far-flung railroad empires of the 19th century.

Macrie owns and operates the Cape May Seashore Lines, using tracks from a turn-of-the-century railroad that once carried passengers from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore. Passenger service to the Shore withered with the advent of the automobile.

In 1996, Macrie revived a service that died in 1981, running trains from Cape May Court House to Cold Spring Village, a reproduction of an early 19th-century community.

Today, the Seashore Line runs four trains a day, from the 4-H fairgrounds outside Cape May Court House 13 miles down to Cape May City and back.

It's the only privately owned passenger service in the state and, Macrie insists, more than just an excursion train.

``We're not an amusement,'' he said. ``We're a real railroad that follows the same rules and regulations as any other railroad.''

Yes, it's a tourist attraction, he said unapologetically, noting that tourism is far and away the No. 1 industry in Cape May County.

But it also is a tourist service and a boost to the economy.

``We're into our fifth year of operation now and we're actually providing transportation.''

People who want to avoid the traffic jams that build up in and approaching Cape May City are parking outside the city and riding the train in, Macrie said.

Therein lies the real potential of the line, Macrie believes, and to realize it, he proposes to extend the line another 14 miles north to Tuckahoe.

``That would make it easier for people staying at Atlantic City or Ocean City to pick up the train and take it to Cape May.''

Macrie has considerable support for this project, from Jeff Warsh, the executive director of NJ Transit, for one, and from his assemblyman, Nicholas Asselta, R-Cumberland, who has introduced a bill to appropriate $3.6 million to refurbish the section of track between Cape May Court House and Tuckahoe, which has fallen into disrepair.

``We'll be able to move tourists up and down the county, north to south,'' Asselta says enthusiastically.

If so, Macrie may have to rethink the line's current mission, dropping the excursion mode that now dominates in favor of faster transportation.

It takes 45 minutes to travel the 13 miles from Cape May City to the fairgrounds in Cape May Court House, a trip that includes stops of 15 minutes each at Cold Spring Village and the downtown area of Cape May Court House, the county seat.

People filling in a rainy day with nonbeach recreation don't mind, but people trying to get somewhere - to work, for example, or to a restaurant in Cape May - probably will.

Bill and Deb Welsh, a Drexel Hill, Pa., couple on vacation at the Shore recently, gave one of the most popular reasons for riding the train.

``We wanted the kids to see what a train ride was like,'' Bill Welsh said, as Mark, 5, and Haley, 3, cavorted on the platform at Cold Spring Village, where the family stopped for a look around.

In the early part of the century, two railroads ran trains from Philadelphia to Cape May and competed with one another by racing 80 mph along tracks that at some points were as close as 50 feet.

Top speed on the Cape May line today is 30 mph. And at some road crossings, conductor Dave Diano, 29, of Pine Hill, hops off to serve as flagman for the train to pass through.

Still, when you look at the happy faces on the trains and in the track-side trailer that serves as railroad headquarters here in this town north of Cape May City, you have to hand it to Macrie.

The grandson of a track maintenance worker and the nephew of a locomotive engineer, Macrie has done, and continues to do, both those jobs on his railroad if he has to.

He worked on five different short-line railroads before talking a bank and the state into helping him resurrect the Cape May Branch, which bore its last passenger train in 1981 and its last freight train in 1983.

NJ Transit has chipped in about $4 million, by one estimate, to rehabilitate a bridge over the Cape May Canal and refurbish the tracks, which it leases to Macrie for nothing with the understanding that he will maintain them.

Macrie declined to say exactly what he borrowed to purchase his rolling stock from the old Pennsylvania- Reading Seashore Line, mostly self-propelled diesel cars made by the Budd Co. of Philadelphia.

But with employees like Bob Harrop, a Laurel Springs engineer with 35 years' experience, at the controls, Macrie makes the 50-year-old cars run on time and at a profit.

Not bad when you compare his 13-mile line with the 34- mile line from Camden to Trenton that NJ Transit is planning to spend roughly $800 million building, maintaining and operating over the next 10 years.

Warsh, the NJ Transit director, is so pleased that Macrie is putting the old track to use that he even is entertaining Macrie's vision of extending the line all the way to Winslow Junction and a hook-up with the Atlantic City line.

In terms of a cost-benefit ratio, Warsh said, the Cape May Line could be the best investment in the state