The Train to New York: Scranton's Long Ride Back to Passenger Rail

For most of the twentieth century, Scranton was a railroad city with trains to prove it: the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western carried passengers from its grand station — now the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel — to Hoboken and the New York ferries. The last passenger service ended in 1970, and the valley has driven to the city ever since, down I-380 and I-80 through the Poconos traffic.

That may eventually change. In December 2023, the Federal Railroad Administration selected the Scranton-to-New-York corridor for its Corridor Identification and Development Program, with initial federal funding for planning studies — the first formal step in a long federal process toward restoring service over the Lackawanna Cut-Off route through New Jersey, where track restoration work has been under way in stages.

The local infrastructure tells the story of both eras. The DL&W yards in Scranton, photographed in the 1890s at the height of the coal trade, are now Steamtown's grounds; freight still moves through the valley under Norfolk Southern and the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad, the designated operator of county-owned lines overseen by the regional railroad authority that Lackawanna and Monroe counties created partly to pursue passenger restoration.

Pennsylvania's interest is regional: a restored train would tie the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metro — more than half a million people — to the New York economy by rail for the first time in two generations, and give the Poconos corridor an alternative to its congested interstates. Planning timelines in federal rail programs run in years, not months, and no opening date exists.

But the direction has reversed. For fifty years the question in Scranton was how the trains left; the current question, with federal planning under way, is what it takes to bring one back.