3-Decade Trolley Heyday

Lures 75 To History Center

Greater Oneonta Historical Society Executive Director Bob Brozowski, top photo, left, welcomes a standing-room-only crowd to rail historian Jim Loudon’s  “The Otsego Trolley Line” lecture this afternoon at the History Center.  Loudon (inset photo) recounted how the Oneonta & Otego Valley Railroad, founded in 1897, expanded to Hartwick, Cooperstown, Richfield Springs and, eventually, Mohawk, in a financially troubled 36-year history before, as the Southern NY Railroad, it finally collapsed in 1933, victim of the ever-more-popular automobile.   Loudon is author of “Leatherstocking Rails: A History of Railroading Along the Upper Susquehanna” and other books on local history. Seated in the foreground in top photo are Steve Judd, left, and Ron Barton, who recalled, as boys on Oneonta’s West End, clambering over an abandoned Climax brand locomotive on boyhood adventures.  (Jim Kevlin/AllOTSEGO.com)