The Delaware & Hudson’s original Conrail trackage rights concession was not the most direct route from the Scranton area to Newark, and when Conrail filed to abandon the Lackawanna Cutoff in the late 1980s the D&H made an immediate offer for the line.
This was not a sale Conrail wanted to make, so, after many months of negotiation (and legal action) the D&H created the Eastern Pennsylvania & New Jersey Railroad to own & operate this line plus whatever other trackage would be needed to operate a shorter route to the NYC area.
The plan for the EP&NJ as a simple bridge line between the Wyoming Valley and Oak Island yard, but when the D&H asked NJ Transit about trackage rights between the Cutoff & the recently acquired Rahway Valley, NJ Transit responded by mentioning that there were a few online shippers that wanted someone other than Conrail, so how about trackage rights over all of the Morris & Essex lines?
(The answer was, of course, yes.)
By 1995, the EP&NJ was essentially complete; trackage rights on the Delaware-Lackawanna from Scranton to Slateford Junction, the Lackawanna cutoff from there to Port Morris, NJ, trackage rights (which became full freight operations in 2019 when CSX surrendered them. This is not nearly as impressive as it seems; the number of online shippers on the Morris & Essex lines can be counted on the fingers of one hand!) on NJ Transit’s Morris & Essex commuter lines, and trackage rights on the Rahway Valley & Conrail’s Lehigh Line to get to Oak Island.
After the Parsons Vale acquired the Providence & Worcester in 2009, the EP&NJ extended their trackage rights from Oak Island yard to the carferries in Bayonne to make a car ferry connection to the P&W at 65th St in Brooklyn.
As part of the trackage rights agreement between the EP&NJ and NJ Transit, the Morristown Line electrification was extended west to Port Morris (in 2012, at a 24' wire height), and six years later they started a project to increase clearances on the rest of the line to Summit (Summit took approximately forever to reprofile, because the existing track was already in a trench and commuter trains could not be stopped.) The long term plan (assuming federal subsidies continue to be available) is to put wire up all the way to Scranton and not have to deal with a diesel transfer there, but in the short term the EP&NJ is happy to pull bridge traffic with diesels.
(It took a surprising amount of time to get NJ Transit to buy into improving track clearance! The state is, understandably, worried about wire sag and out of clearance debris on top of the containers, so wire height needs to be absolutely set at 23 to 24 feet, and it takes a considerable amount of work to get there from the 17 foot minimum wire height that previously existed on the M&E lines.)
As of 2025, the EP&NJ typically sees 8 container freights a day to and from Oak Island, another pair of (single-stacked) container freights to and from CSX’s Kearny intermodal terminal (a CSX concession from dismantling Conrail, and lemme tell you CSX was pissed about having to grant those rights), and at least one local freight on each of the M&E lines & in the Wyoming Valley.)
Roster
A largish chunk of the EP&NJ either doesn’t have any local customers or runs on trackage rights that does not allow it to handle local freight, so it has a fairly small roster for its size. It rosters almost a score of high horsepower units for moving intermodal traffic and a bakers dozen smaller units for terminal duties and local freight.
Originally the EP&NJ used diesels for local freight in New Jersey, but switched to dual power units (initially a couple of grossly overpowered DP3s, but in 2022 those were sent back to the D&H in favor of a pair of new DP4s) to cut down on emissions.
| numbers | class | description | builder | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 680-682 | DL23m | C-635 | ALCO | |
| 683-689 | DL23 | C-628m | ALCO | |
| 1241-1248 | DP3 | eco-644e/pb | ILW | |
| 1216-1221 | DL16c | RS-11m | ALCO | ex-Erie Mining #302,303,305-308 |
| 667-670 | J2 | B+B steeplecab | Portland | for freight on the Langston Branch. |
| 1400-1402 | DP4 | eco-435/50e | ILW | for freight on the Morris & Essex lines. |