page_title: Paterson station
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Paterson station / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1. GENERAL VIEW OF THE STATION - Erie Railway, Paterson Station, Paterson, Passaic County, NJ 11-30-13
context_page_description: Paterson is a New Jersey Transit commuter rail train station located on an elevated viaduct above Market Street in downtown Paterson, New Jersey. The railway through the station is double tracked, for north and south traffic on the NJT Main Line.
context_section_description: Paterson station has always only served one railroad line: the Main Line of the Erie Railroad, along with its successors, the main lines of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad (EL), Conrail legacy EL division (operated under NJDOT), and finally the present-day New Jersey Transit Main Line. However, the Main Line itself has changed substantially over the years, leading to significant changes in usage, destinations, and connections.
  Originally a single track at grade, the elevated station was built between 1924-30 when the Erie Railroad eliminated street level crossings on its Main Line in Paterson. The Erie Main Line ran from Jersey City to Chicago via Binghamton, Buffalo, Akron, Ohio, and Marion, Ohio. 
  Major long distance passenger and freight trains passed through this section of track, and many of those passenger trains stopped at Paterson. The Erie Limited and the Lake Cities served passengers heading toward Chicago. The station received eastbound passengers from the Atlantic Express. This situation was stable from the inception of the station until the early 1960s, when the Erie Railroad was in major financial difficulties.
  Due to the financial issues, the Erie merged with the Lackawanna in 1960, to form the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, or EL. The EL immediately looked to reduce costs by eliminating redundant lines and consolidating passenger train routes. The Erie Limited and the Lake Cities were rerouted away from Paterson and instead over the Lackawanna main line through northwest New Jersey and the Poconos. Unnamed trains to Binghamton, where passengers could switch to the Phoebe Snow after a layover. The discontinuing of the Phoebe Snow (1966) and the Atlantic Express (1965) marked the end of long distance passenger service through Paterson.
  Serendipitously, four government agencies had been developing plans that, to succeed, required changes or destruction to sections of the Erie Main Line:
  The city of Passaic wish to remove the Main Line grade trackage from the city's primary business district. There was no viable rerouting available pre-merger, and so negotiations never went through.
  Further east along the line, the state of New Jersey wished to extend State Route 21, but the Main Line was in the way, including its bridge over the Passaic River. Once more, the Erie had no viable options for rerouting the Main Line
  In Paterson itself, the state and Federal governments wished to use the Lackawanna Boonton Branch right of way at Garret Mountain to build what would become Interstate 80. This would have required difficult rerouting of that line for the Lackawanna Railroad.
  With the 1960 EL merger, the legacy Lackawanna lines were now available to create a new Main Line, and the legacy Erie lines were available to create new routes for the Boonton line. Acceding to the above government requests became possible, with the triple benefit of removing government pressure, eliminating redundancy in the lines and schedules, and reducing costs for maintenance,  capital, and taxes with the abandonment or sale of rights of way. The Route 21 and downtown Passaic plans require severing the entire Passaic portion of the Main Line, and stranded adjacent sections in Clifton, and Paterson and beyond. Included in this stranded section was the Paterson station.
  To fix this problem, a connection from the Boonton Branch was built. This allowed the Main Line to realign on a parallel route, with minimal construction, running trains from Hoboken (instead of Jersey City) through the Boonton Branch stations that had previously provided minor competition to the Erie stations. Once these trains reached Paterson, they used the new connection to continue on the original Main Line tracks, including service to Paterson Station. The connection was single-tracked for many years, but double-tracked in 2002. The remainder of the Boonton Branch, also severed at I-80, was realigned to continue on the old Erie Greenwood Lake Branch.
  The EL went bankrupt in the early 1970s. Conrail took over its operations, but the Main Line did not fit Conrail's plans, since th
caption: The former Paterson station of the Erie Railroad on November 30, 1913, prior to the track being raised
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