In the mid 1980s, the Delaware & Hudson was looking around to see if they could arrange a shorter route than their circuitous Conrail merger concession trackage rights from Scranton to Oak Island yard in Newark. A shorter route was found, but a short but significant part of this route was the Rahway Valley Railroad, which connected between the old Erie Lackawanna main and the Lehigh Line, which was how the D&H’s concession trackage rights got into Oak Island.
The Rahway Valley was in the midst of hard times, so they were welcoming when the D&H approached them to ask about trackage rights, but before any agreement could be made their insurer cancelled their liability insurance and made it impossible for them to continue as a separate railroad.
With this in mind, the D&H offered to buy the railroad instead (the Parsons Vale had liability insurance up the wazoo, so the additional liability cover was not a problem) and so it was done.
In the years since, not much has changed on the Rahway Valley; the name of the railroad was changed to the Rahway Valley Railway, for one, the trackage has been upgraded to support larger locomotives, 50mph trains and double-stack container cars (as a concession to the local communities the trains don’t run much over 30mph across most of the RV), and, in anticipation of the day when parent EP&NJ is able to electrify to Scranton, the line has been electrified from Kenilworth to Summit.
In the mid-2010s, the Rahway Valley was awarded operating rights on the ex-Baltimore & Ohio branch between Cranford & the Arthur Kill Bridge, which it operates as the Staten Island Railway of New Jersey.
In 2024, the EP&NJ contracted with the RV to operate their isolated chunk of the original D&H trackage rights from Roselle to Bayonne, thus doubling the RV’s milage (but not producing any more revenue except for the traffic origination fees from container freight into and out of Bayonne.)
Roster
The Rahway Valley has a few remaining customers (one at the end of the Rahway River branch, one at the end of the Unionburg branch, and one along the now-mainline in Kenilworth) so it rosters a single DL10 for that traffic, two more DL10s to handle terminal operations in Bayonne & on the SIRNJ, and one of the three class Kh motors as a pusher to help move intermodal trains up to the junction at Summit.
Traffic into and out of Bayonne is handled by EP&NJ dual-power locomotives.