Business & Finance: Ausable Upshot

Some 10,000 rustic souls, devoted to dairying, inhabit the lovely Ausable valley which runs 23″ miles in a generally south-west direction from the city of Plattsburg, N. Y. Since 1894 Leonor Fresnel Loree’s Delaware & Hudson Co. R. R. had served them well. The inhabitants told time by the train’s whistle, their cows grazed contentedly as the locomotive chuffed uncertainly by.

But one morning in 1929 the Ausable countryside remained strangely quiet. Passenger trains had ceased running; the ticket windows were closed in Ausable Forks. Rogers, Arnold, Harkness, Peru, Salmon River, Cliff Haven, all the way to Plattsburg. And that might have been the end of passenger trains in the Ausable valley had not there soon returned from a trip to Greenland small, baldish Artist Rockwell Kent. When Artist Kent found there was no train to his home at the end of the line he was furious. Never afraid of a fight or of publicity, he determined to battle bushy-bearded old Railroader Loree and his whole D&H system. This he did with his cousin Philip Wager Lowry, a young lawyer so astute that he kept Belle Livingstone out of trouble for many a month. During the hearings Mr. Loree’s men painted a pathetic picture of their Ausable branch line. One train, they claimed, made 50 round trips without a passenger. An average trip netted only two fares.

But Lawyer Lowry was clever and Artist Kent crusaded loudly. The story got into the newspapers and the Public Service Commission decided against the railroad. In November 1930 passenger service was resumed.

Traffic in the Ausable valley has, however, grown no heavier. Last week the Public Service Commission, looking no doubt at D&H’s net operating income ($1,585.000 for the first seven months this year against $2,663.000 last) took pity and reversed its decision. Passengers up Ausable valley must now travel by omnibus along the fine concrete highway that parallels the rails.