LENGTH: About 23 miles

PRESENT STATUS: Undeveloped. CLOSED to the public.

STATUS DETAILS: This section of the trail is not done and is still in private ownership. An effort is underway to use federal and local matching dollars to begin acquiring the rail bed. We hope that with the success of the trail between Wassaic and Copake Falls, the construction of this long segment of trail will eventually be achieved.

NATURAL FEATURES, FLORA & FAUNA:
To be developed as trail is constructed.

LOCAL HISTORY*
Hillsdale: The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who lived in Austerlitz, used the Hillsdale Station frequently. Hillsdale was the site of a 19th century iron works, and after 1900, the town had a Sheffield Farms milk plant. After the milk plant closed, it was used by a wholesale produce distributor. Hillsdale had a cattle pen for shipping cattle by rail. Herrington's Lumber received building supply products by rail until service ended in 1976. Hillsdale was an important station for vacationers and weekenders from Columbia County and nearby Massachusetts. Children traveling to summer camps in the Berkshires took special camp trains and got off at Hillsdale. Copake Falls Station served the many camps in West Copake.

Craryville: The site of a passenger and freight station and a Borden's Milk plant. It had a spur to Copake Lake for ice harvesting and a cattle pen for shipping livestock to New York City slaughterhouses. Vacationers going to cottages and the former Copake Country Club at Copake Lake got off the train here.

Martindale: The site of a passenger station.

Philmont: This town was named for George Phillips who developed an industrial town there including textile mills. "Swiss Farms" received carloads of Canadian peat moss until the end of rail service in 1976.

Ghent: The site of the junction between the New York City Harlem Division and Boston & Albany Railroads, Hudson-Chatham Branch.

Chatham: A major railroad junction for the Boston & Albany Railroad's main line and a terminal for the Harlem Division, the Boston & Albany Railroad's Hudson-Chatham Branch, and the Rutland Railroad's Bennington Branch. The town had a large railroad yard and engine service facilities. Chatham is still a railroad town in spite of the new weekenders and touristy redevelopment taking place. Until the early 1950's, milk produced in Vermont and shipped on the Rutland Railroad was transferred to the Harlem Division for New York City destinations.

This former Boston & Albany Railroad main line is a heavy-duty freight main line for the Conrail system which was just acquired by the mega-giant CSX Railroad Corporation. Amtrak also uses this railroad for its Boston-Albany passenger trains. As many as twenty long, heavy freight trains a day rumble through the village.

Chatham has a yearly Railroad Heritage Festival at the firehouse located on a vestige of the Harlem Division track. Chatham has converted about one mile of former Harlem Line track running south from the village along Route 66 to a rail trail. The trail goes through a residential part of the village. Residents use it to walk to the Grand Union shopping center.

A large Blue Seal Feeds distribution center is located in the former Harlem Division property at Chatham. Feed and grain from the midwest is unloaded from rail cars and delivered to farms in the tri-state region by truck. This replaced direct rail shipment to the small towns that lost rail services during the massive downsizing of the regional rail system in the 1970's and 1980's.

DIRECTIONS
Parking and access yet to be determined once trails have been developed.

*Note: Many thanks to local railroad historians Heyward Cohen, Jack Shufelt, and Lou Grogan (The Coming of the New York and Harlem Railroad, Pawling, NY: Louis V. Grogan, 1989) for much of the railroad history that appears above.