Here indeed was the golden age of the Rome road. Its bright, neat, yellow cars, its smartly painted and trimmed engines all bespoke the existence of a prosperous little rail carrier, that might have left well enough alone. But, seemingly it could not. There is a man living in the western part of this state, who recalls one fine day there in the mid-seventies, when Mr. Massey—the President of the road, came walking out of the Watertown station, talking all the time to Mr. Moak, its General Superintendent—came over to him:
“We’re going to be a real railroad at last, John,” said he. “We’re going through to Niagara Falls upon our own rails and get into the trunk-line class.”
He was giving expression to a dream of years. A moment ago and we were speaking of the operation through two or three summers of sleeping-cars between Watertown and the White Mountains over the R. W. & O., the Northern (at that time, already become the Ogdensburgh & Lake Champlain), the Central Vermont, the Montpelier and Wells River, and the Portland and Ogdensburgh. The officers of the Rome road felt that, if they could bridge the gap existing between the terminals of their line at Oswego, and go through to Suspension Bridge or Buffalo, where there were plenty of competing lines through to Chicago and the West, that they could both enter upon the competitive business of carrying western freight to the Atlantic seaboard, and at the same time stand independent of the New York Central. Eventually their idea was to take a concrete form, but again I anticipate.
In that brisk day there was, in the slow and laborious process of building a railroad, leading due west from Oswego. It was called the Lake Ontario Shore Railroad, and its construction was indeed a laborious process. For many years it came to an end just eighteen miles beyond Oswego. Finally it reached the little village of Ontario, fifty-one miles beyond. And there stopped dead. If it had forever been halted there, it would have been a good thing. Its promoters were both industrious and persistent, however. They chose to overlook the fact that the narrow territory, that they sought to thread, promised small local traffic returns for many years to come; a thin strip it was between the main line of the New York Central and the south shore of Lake Ontario, and although nearly 150 miles in length, never more than twelve or fifteen in width, and without any sizable communities. The prospect of a profitable traffic, originating in so thin a strip, was small indeed.
The prospectors of the Lake Ontario Shore Railroad did not see it that way. They stressed the fact that at Sterling they would intersect the Southern Central (now the Lehigh Valley), at Sodus the Northern Central (now the Pennsylvania), at Charlotte; the port of Rochester, the Rochester & State Line (now the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh) all in addition to the many valuable connections to be made at the Niagara River. Yet for a considerable time after the road had been pushed through Western New York, it came to a dead stop at Lewiston. Its original terminal can still be seen in that small village.
It was then thought possible and feasible to build a railroad bridge across the Niagara and the international boundary between Lewiston and Queenstown, in competition with the Suspension Bridge, which from the very moment of its opening in 1849 had been an overwhelming success. The energetic group of Oswego men who had promoted the building of the Lake Ontario Shore, hoped to duplicate the success of the Suspension Bridge there at Lewiston. They saw that small frontier New York town transformed into a real railroad metropolis.
“And what a line we shall have, running right up to it!” they argued. “Seventy-three out of our seventy-six miles, west of the Genesee River, as straight as the proverbial ruler-edge; and a maximum gradient of but twenty-six feet to the mile! What opportunities for fast—and efficient operation!”
They had capitalized their line at $4,000,000 and in October, 1870, when I first find official mention of it, they had expended $54,300 upon it. Its officers at that time were: