Like many railfans (including the great E. M. Frimbo) I keep track of my mileage. I have a spreadsheet with the trains and routes I’ve been on, including dates and most importantly distances. I can tell you that I passed 100,000 miles on Amtrak on January 7, 2020, on the Capitol Limited, roughly 163 miles west of Washington, DC. This means I can I get a little obsessive about determining mileage, and can send me down a rabbit hole if it’s unclear what distance I traveled.
Railroads used to include mileage information in their timetables. Amtrak did right up until the discontinuance of paper timetables in the last few years. For railroads in Europe, the best source of information are the railway atlases published by Schweers + Wall. These maps are extraordinarily detailed, showing lines and distances (in kilometers). For the US, the best source of distance are employee timetables. As the source suggests, these are internal documents used by employees. They show distances, sidings, speed limits, and include various rules governing operation. Distance doesn’t change all that often, so older employee timetables can still be useful.
I’ve made 14 trips on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line since 2016. But first, a nomenclature issue. The Raritan Valley Line is both a physical piece of infrastructure and a service that uses that infrastructure and the two are not coterminous. The service runs from High Bridge, New Jersey (Raritan on weekdays) to Newark, New Jersey. A limited number of trains continue from Newark to Pennsylvania Station in New York, but usually you transfer in New York.
The infrastructure is that part of the former Central Railroad of New Jersey main line that the state bought. It also starts at High Bridge, but it’s been abandoned east of Aldene (see Aldene Connection on Wikipedia for the gory details). From Aldene, the service uses part of the former Lehigh Valley Railroad main line to reach Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Conrail owns this portion. Finally, the service uses the Northeast Corridor for a little under two miles to reach Newark Penn.
A train running from Raritan to Newark uses lines built by the Central Railroad of New Jersey, Lehigh Valley Railroad, and Pennsylvania Railroad (Northeast Corridor). A public timetable would just show the mileage from New York City; employee timetables will show the mileage based on a particular lines termini, and in this case those don’t match up. The building of the Aldene Connection is a further complication; employee timetables from before 1967 won’t have the right information. You also can’t blindly trust the milepost that a station is located at; all modern internal timetables place Newark Penn at MP 8.8. Newark is 10 miles from New York Penn.
Last week I acquired an NJ Transit employee timetable (2005 vintage, new enough) that helped me resolve all these quandaries and determine my mileage from Raritan. First, all mileage on the ex-CNJ is still reckoned based on the long-disused Communipaw Terminal. Raritan is at MP 35.9; the Aldene Connection is MP 15.0. That’s 20.9 miles. From Aldene we’re on the ex-Lehigh Valley; the Lehigh Valley main line started at 1.0 in Jersey City; the 0.0 signified barge service across the Hudson to Manhattan. No, the Hudson isn’t exactly a mile across. Aldene is MP 16.9 on the Lehigh Line. Newark is MP 8.8; so that’s 8.1 miles.
If you’re still here you might object that Newark is Pennsylvania Railroad territory and there should be a mismatch. I agree and there isn’t. I found a Pennsylvania Railroad employee timetable from 1939 that shows Newark at 10 miles from New York and Hunter, roughly where the Lehigh Valley Railroad connects, at 11.8 (it’s at 10.5 now). In the absence of evidence I’ll blame Conrail for this. Anyway, it’s 10 miles from Newark to New York. Amtrak deals with the numbering issue when you get to Harold Interlocking, between Newark and Secaucus Junction. It’s indicated as “MP 8.3/7.2”, and it’s about .1 mile across. Congratulations, everything adds up now.
That’s the story of calculating the distance from Raritan to New York Penn. Raritan, located at MP 35.9 on the Raritan Valley Line, is 39 miles from New York on a Raritan Valley Line train.