Charlie Fineran’s Photo of the Week is a view from atop the Paulinskill Viaduct looking West. 

Keep in mind, this vantage point is over a hundred feet above the Paulinskill and roadway passing underneath.  Looking at the center of this photo, notice two small white dots, those are the dual towers of the historic Hainesburg Inn, now an animal hospital along Route 94.  I have added a photo of the Inn to my Flickr site to give you a better perspective of how tall those towers are.  The distant ridge is part of Mount Tammany in the Delaware Water Gap, located off this photo to your left.  The end of the ridge to your right is located by Yards Creek Pump Storage Generating Station in Blairstown. It amazes me, how something this big, 1,100 feet in length and 115 feet tall can be literally so out of sight!!!  You really do not notice this huge structure, until you are literally approaching and getting ready to pass underneath on the road or in the water.  There are a couple of places that you may get a view of the structure, BUT, you had better know it is there, OR, be looking very carefully perusing the countryside!!  It is fun to look at the older pictures of this area, without all the trees, then the viaduct did stand out!!

The viaduct was built by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western RR as part of the Lackawanna Cut-Off, a project that replaced an older route with a straighter and flatter route through the mountains of northwestern New Jersey. (A sister bridge of similar design but smaller dimension, the Delaware River Viaduct, carries the Lackawanna Cut-Off over the Delaware River and into Pennsylvania.)  The bridge was considered a pioneering work that opened the door to the building of even larger concrete viaducts by the Lackawanna, most notably the Tunkhannock Viaduct in Pennsylvania in 1915.

Opened to regular rail traffic on Christmas Eve 1911, the Paulinskill Viaduct, supported by its seven graceful arches, carried DL&W trains until 1960, when the railroad merged with the Erie Railroad to form the Erie Lackawanna RR. The Erie Lackawanna RR in turn operated the Cut-Off until 1976 when the railroad was conveyed into Conrail, which ran trains until 1979, abandoned the line in 1982, and removed the tracks in 1984.

New Jersey Transit is working to restore commuter service along the Cut-Off, with the 7.3-mile (11.7 km) section from Lake Hopatcong, NJ to Andover, NJ, which is currently under construction and slated to open in 2020. NJT has proposed to restore the rest of the Cut-Off, including the Paulinskill Viaduct, and restore passenger service into northeastern Pennsylvania, possibly as far as Scranton.

The Paulinskill Viaduct is also known for its internal chambers (used to inspect the structural integrity of the bridge).  In the early 1980’s I was a member of the NJ State Police T.E.A.M.S. Unit and we use to use the viaduct to practice rappelling and rescue scenarios.

Please visit my Flickr site for photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/charliefineran/albums/72157697477081344

Enjoy Your Open Space, Charlie Fineran