The Cut-Off’s genesis involves two men who most likely never met: John I. Blair and William Truesdale. Blair built the DL&W’s Warren Railroad, chartered in 1851 and completed in 1862, to provide a connection between the mainlines of the DL&W in Pennsylvania and the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) in New Jersey. But when the Lackawanna-CNJ merger fell through and the Lackawanna merged with the Morris & Essex Railroad in New Jersey instead, the Warren Railroad became part of a circuitous patchwork of rail lines connecting two unanticipated merger partners.
The 39-mile (63 km) route (later known as the “Old Road” after the New Jersey Cut-Off opened) had numerous curves that restricted trains to 50 mph (80 km/h). The bigger operational problem, however, was caused by the two tunnels on the line: Manunka Chunk Tunnel, a 975-foot (297 m) twin-bore tunnel whose eastern approach occasionally flooded with heavy rains; and the 2,969-foot (905 m) single-bore Oxford Tunnel, which was double-tracked in 1869 and reduced to gauntlet (overlapping) tracks in 1901. As more and more traffic moved over the line, Oxford Tunnel became the Lackawanna Railroad’s worst bottleneck.
Truesdale became DL&W president on March 2, 1899 with a mandate to upgrade the entire 900-mile (1,450 km) railroad. Early on, the railroad focused on increasing freight capacity by using larger locomotives and cars, as well as strengthening bridges to handle these larger loads. Although Truesdale recognized early on that the Old Road needed to be replaced, with the railroad’s interest in building a new bypass line surfacing in the press as early as 1901, it really wasn’t until 1905 that the railroad was in a position to take up the project in earnest. This led Truesdale to seek authorization from the railroad’s Board of Managers to send out teams of surveyors to map out potential replacement routes westward from Port Morris, New Jersey, to the Delaware River for what would be the railroad’s largest project up until that time.
