Rochester and State Line Railroad
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Rochester and State Line Railroad was a 19th-century railroad company in New York state.
Background
In the middle of the 19th century, Rochester, New York's need for transportation had not adequately been met by either the Genesee Valley Canal or the small local railroads that had been combined into the two major companies: the New York Central, with the Tonawanda, the Attica and Buffalo, and the Auburn and Rochester, and the Erie, with the Cohocton Valley and the Rochester and Genesee Valley lines.
The purpose of the new railroad sought by the Rochester industrial and commercial interests was plain - the provision of cheap and reliable transport of Pennsylvania coal to the city of Rochester. During the mid-1860s, the price of coal in Rochester had tripled. However, since the financial support of the outlying farm and commercial interests was vital to the project, in one of the lesser deceptions of the railroad building era, it was intimated to the public in the towns and villages of the Genesee Valley that the road would be built through western New York to carry agricultural products to city markets. While Rochester came up with $600,000 utilizing municipal bonds, rural communities raised nearly as much on their own.
The organization of the new rail line, the Rochester and State Line Railroad, occurred on 8 April 1869.
Purpose
Energy for the industry in Western New York at this time came from Pennsylvania coal, and the existing railroads were the sole means of getting it to the Rochester area. The railroads knew this, and their pricing reflected it. In 1863, a ton of coal cost approximately six dollars.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rochester and State Line Railroad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.