In the mid 1980s, the Delaware & Hudson was looking around to see if they could arrange a shorter route than their circuitous Conrail merger concession trackage rights from Scranton to Oak Island yard in Newark. A short but significant part of this route was the Rahway Valley Railroad, which connected between the old Erie Lackawanna main and the Lehigh Line, which was how the D&H’s concession trackage rights got into Oak Island.
The Rahway Valley was in the midst of hard times, so they were welcoming when the D&H approached them to ask about trackage rights, but before any agreement could be made their insurer cancelled their liability insurance and made it impossible for them to continue as a separate railroad.
With this in mind, the D&H offered to buy the railroad instead (the Parsons Vale had liability insurance up the wazoo, so the additional liability cover was not a problem) and so it was done.
In the years since, not much has changed on the Rahway Valley; the name of the railroad was changed to the Rahway Valley Railway, for one, the trackage has been upgraded to support larger locomotives, 50mph trains and double-stack container cars (as a concession to the local communities the trains don’t run much over 30mph across most of the RV, though those communities are increasingly unhappy about them now that there are 8 of them a day), and, in anticipation of the day when parent EP&NJ is able to electrify to Scranton, the line has been electrified from Kenilworth to Summit.
Roster
The Rahway Valley has a few remaining customers (one at the end of the Rahway River branch, one at the end of the Unionburg branch, and one along the now-mainline in Kenilworth) so it rosters a single DL10 for that traffic, and it also keeps one of the three class Kh motors as a pusher to help move intermodal trains up to the junction at Summit.