The Last Train

The Nor’easter of 1935 and the End of the Island Railroad

By Reilly Platten Sharp

Over the vast bay humanity swells to the shoreline as summer begins anew. As if flicked innumerably skyward by delicate strokes of the brush from a heavenly painter, the water dances beneath the decks of the four bridges between Long Beach Island and the vast country it marks the eastern edge of — a final continental umbilical before the immensity of the Atlantic and the old world far beyond. Few communities can lay claim to having been so shaped by a single piece of infrastructure as the Island and its bridges. After more than a century with the automobile, capable of moving any man, woman or child hundreds of miles comfortably and economically, today it is hard to imagine the earliest days of the miles-wide watery divide and the marvel of its bridging for the railroad and that mode of transportation’s revolutionary power to alter the course of American history. With so few relics and buildings left from that time, all we have left are echoes on the winds of history coursing across the great bay and through cottage windows like a visiting old friend. The last whisper of a bygone era on the Island came one stormy day in the fall of 1935.

The top left corner of the front page of the Asbury Park Press for Saturday, November 16, 1935, bore an unconcerning weather forecast. “Light Rain Today, Probably Tomorrow; Little Change in Temperature.” But on Monday, November 18, the headline screamed something terrible had happened over the weekend. That something was what Barnegat Light Mayor T. Jay France described as weather of “such fury or causing so much damage” as not even the old-timers could remember worse.

Nineteen thirty-five was already an active and late year for storms. A hurricane had passed the east coast less than two weeks before the mid-November blow. Then, on Sunday, November 17, the first of several powerful storms that winter advanced up from the coast of the Carolinas and brought snow, rain, wind, and flooding with it across the region.

Folks from as far north as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania were stranded in their homes and on highways by snow, relieved only by emergency air drops of aid from the Army. Farther south along the coast, many were also stranded by devastating flooding.

On Long Beach Island at the height of the storm on Sunday night, November 17, into Monday afternoon, November 18, the effects were terrible.

Winds gusted over 65mph. Tide gauges registered the highest levels in decades. Dunes were almost completely washed away from Barnegat City to Holgate. Two to three feet of water covered the Boulevard and side streets.

Just north of Barnegat Inlet, on Island Beach, a new inlet was opened. The Ship Bottom and Beach Haven fishing piers lost over half their length. Beach Haven saw its boardwalk tossed aside from 5th to 8th Streets. Several hundred people on the Island ahead of the storm waited too long to leave, finding themselves trapped after the automobile bridge was covered by a still-rising, choppy bay. In Harvey Cedars, seventy families sought refuge on the estate of Frederick Small as scores of homes were badly damaged.

All told, the nor’easter of November 1935 did over $2.5 million in damage up and down the New Jersey coast.

Within days of the storm, the county engineer was surveying the shoreline of Long Beach and recommended new brush-and-pole beach-works to rehabilitate the now narrow barrier between the Atlantic and homeowners. The board of freeholders readily accepted the plan and moved around $5,000 in highway funds to get straight to work on the most vulnerable sections of beach, including Harvey Cedars and Beach Haven.

Also a casualty of the 1935 nor’easter was the struggling but still active Tuckerton Railroad, as well as the automobile bridge which sustained such damage that Mayor France reported that “two cars could not pass one another in places.” The damage to the latter would be repaired in a matter of weeks. The railroad would not enjoy a similar resurrection. The trestle bridge, which had carried train passengers just above the waters of Manahawkin Bay since 1886 and since 1914 ran parallel to the automobile bridge, was washed apart, and scattered over the bay and Cedar Bonnet Island.

The destruction from the storm, though, came at a time when the railroad was already lumbering along on a wing and a prayer, waiting for absolution from a certain and imminent end.

The profitability of the railroad connection to the Island was always a struggle, in spite of how it transformed the area through the pace of home development, the growth of the tourism industry and serving as a vital connection between Island businesses and homeowners and the major market cities of Philadelphia and Camden.

Ironically after bankruptcies, the arrival of cars and the tearing up of the tracks to the less traveled north end terminating at Barnegat Light, passenger and freight service actually soared to record highs delivering tourists and goods to and from the cities to the south end of the Island and the old bayside hubs of Tuckerton and Barnegat, home to several successful factories and mills in those days.

The peak came in 1925 when Tuckerton Railroad saw profits of nearly $38,000 from passenger travel on its rail roads and over $135,000 in freight, or $658,000 and $2.3 million in today’s dollars. As had happened before, the changing habits of travelers, cutthroat railroad competition, and the ever-watchful Pennsylvania Railroad looking to collect fees for use of what were originally its tracks combined to bring an end to the good times. By the November gale of 1935, the Tuckerton Railroad had suffered such a decline that it only turned a net profit of $4,000 that year.

Rather than a shocking blow, the loss of the train bridge was a mercy killing.

One last train left the Island as the storm struck on November 16. Tuckerton Railroad historian John Brinkmann recounted the scene in his great book of the same name.

“Locomotive No. 7, in charge of [engineman Everett H. Cook] with [fireman George T. Rutter] firing, was returning with a freight move from Beach Haven,” Brinkmann wrote. “Rain pelted against cab windows as the old gal attained Manahawkin Bay trestle.” Waves broke over the tracks, striking fear into the hearts of the men aboard. Luckily, they made it across safely. The next day, their escape became official as the final locomotive and cars to ever pass over the tracks to the mainland. Nearly a mile of track was ripped from its supports and lay submerged, adrift and washed up across the western side of the bay. Salvage efforts costing $10,000 recovered much of the debris.

The loss of the bridge, estimated to cost over $100,000 to replace, was not why the Tuckerton Railroad and the railroad to the Island as a whole failed shortly after, never to be revived. But the bridge washing away, like so many other landmarks of an era when the past was still the present and people with dreams could lay into the lonely sands the foundations for the future, was the final straw that sealed the fate of the age of rail and the first bridge to the Island.

The nor’easter of ’35 isn’t talked of in the same hallowed breath as the mythical storms of ’44, ’62 and Sandy. But its impact was no less historical and Island-altering. The echoes of that day whisper down the bay, captured poetically by an unnamed writer to the Tuckerton Beacon on the occasion of the railroad’s end.

The End of the Line

It grieves my pride to an acute extent,
When I read of the passing, with a long lament
Of a railroad that in days gone by
Was the humble pride of the native eye…

The train’s personnel were the salt of the earth,
With Noblesse Oblige as their motto of worth.
Conductor [James] Kelley, now gone to his rest
Was one of the finest, kindest and best…

And mighty and fine was engineer [Archie Pharo Sr],
Who watched the days closely, but never the hours.
And Johnny Spencer was another of true worth
That let glory pass and uttered few words.

And John C. Price, of the austere mien,
With his famous rejoinder to his competitive dean:
‘It’s not as long as your road, by Gosh,
But it’s just as wide and that’s no bosh.’…

I shall bow my head as the embers fade out
And turn my footsteps away and about.
From the sights that filled my boyhood days
With the great aplomb of by-gone ways

And murmur alone in muffled tones
As homeward I drag my weary bones.
‘Your place in fame is earned and well.
Yours is the honor, Adieu and farewell!’