GROWING UP ON THE DL&W BOONTON LINE

                         By Gordon Lattey

         Expanded from an article that originally appeared
                 in the Empire & Eastern "Consist"

         I started to write this article about spring, primarily
because I've had enough of winter.  That lead to spring cleaning, a
human ritual that undoubtedly goes back to the time when we first
crawled out of the swamp and the trees and moved into the best cave
the family could afford.  That lead to thinking about my mother's
curtain stretcher (a household article long on the endangered
species list), the attic where it was stored and Towaco (N.J.), the
town in which the attic was situated.  That lead to thinking about
the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad's Boonton Line, which
ran through Towaco, and our station agent, Charlie Mazzucco.

         All of this was long before television brought the world
to our doorstep and kept kids nailed to the couch.  It was the time
of radio and World War II.  In the summer the three of us --
Charlie's son Ronnie, Bill "Chick" Garro and myself -- would walk
the tracks to the Towaco station to beg seat check tickets from the
conductors and play some game or other in the empty box cars and
hoppers that often sat on the Towaco siding or skip "scalers" off
the surface of the "Railroad pond, a slag-colored body of water so
named because of its proximity to the tracks.

         This was also a time when railroads still offered
less-than-carload service so the box cars might sit there for two
or three days.  The hoppers serviced the local "Blue Coal" dealer. 
Occasionally, we were lucky enough to catch the Boonton roustabout
as it came through collecting the empties.

         We had all seen, read and heard stories of kids being
allowed to ride in the cab by some compassionate engineer.  It
never happened to us.  Once, however, Charlie did get us a ride in
the caboose for the mile or so run from the Towaco station to a
spot behind our houses.

         On other still, summer days we would stretch out in the
field that separated our collection of homes from the tracks and
record the road names and serial numbers of the cars of the
seemingly endless freight trains as they struggled up long incline
from Towaco to Montville (an even smaller town up the line).  I'm
not sure what we ever did with the long lists we compiled, or am I
even sure why we ever wrote them down.  But write them we did.  By
railroad, car type and number.

         I guess in some way the rolling stock was our window on
the country.  The Union Pacific shield, the Santa Fe, the Baltimore
& Ohio, the Chicago & Northwestern....All names that brought home a
certain place, an image of where that box car, that stock car or
gondola had come from or where it was going.  There was no bland,
imageless Conrail, CSX, et al. Only real names, attached to real
places.  We carefully recorded each time something from Santa Fe
country went past our back door.

         We also watched long passenger trains go by, their windows
shrouded with "blackout" curtains.  We told ourselves and each
other there were German prisoners of war on board.  "My dad told me
they take them out west to the desert," Ronnie would say, every
time one passed, with a knowing tone since his old man was the
station agent.  Whether that was the case or not I really can't
remember nor am I sure we ever really found out.

         It was from this field in the spring of '45 that we saw
our first road diesel.  It wasn't black and it certainly didn't
chug or hiss, its wheels didn't spin as it crawled up the great
long hill.  Instead it was all gray and maroon and growled a lot. 

         The Boonton Line still had four tracks.  Counting most
generously, Towaco had 900 or so people so being a station agent
wasn't a taxing line of work for Charlie.  Charlie did a variety of
things in addition to his station agent duties.  He was the local
taxi service, played cards at Keever Connor's garage and he swore a
lot.  The last trait endeared him to us kids, but did little to
enhance his standing with the adults in the neighborhood.

         Despite Charlie's line of work, I don't remember the
Mazzucco kids ever having a set of trains.  The Garro's did,
however.  They lived in the other half of the Mazzucco house.  One
year (either Christmas of 1947 or '48), "Chick" Garro's old man
went out a bought him GG-1 set.  Talk about flaunting your wealth. 
We all hated "Chick" after that.  It was little compensation that
Garro's old man never let Bill play with the GG-1, just look at it.

         Across the road at the Galla's it was different.  First
off, Mrs. Galla was everybody's favorite.  Did her a favor and you
got a candy bar.  Be with someone who did her a favor and you got a
candy bar.  Everybody like her son, Jay.  This was a kid of
imagination.  He was constantly concocting great schemes and
stories.  I'm convinced he inherited his imagination from his
father, who also worked for the DL&W, or possibly the Erie (in
engineering, I think).  Jay had trains.  His father built him the
most magnificent bi-level sectional layout we had ever seen.  It
was, in effect, a Lionel Brigadoon.  To young eyes trains seemed to
go every which way and back.  In actuality, if I remember
correctly, three trains could run simultaneously.

         But, the greatest part of the layout was the switch
tower.  While it was totally out of scale, it contained a row of
authentically reproduced switch levers that actually threw switches
via connecting rods that ran alongside the tracks.

         The sections would come down to the Galla living room in
early December, one of two harbingers of the coming of the season. 
The other was the family's annual pilgrimage to Madison Hardware to
service our #249E and to the Lionel and American Flyer showrooms.
During the war years we went via the DL&W (gasoline ration kept
auto travel to essentials) to Hoboken, a station filled with
wonderful smells and sounds that are as vivid today as they were
almost 50 years ago).  But that's another story.

         Jay would always announce the upcoming event as we waited
for the school bus.  "It's coming down on Saturday," he would say.
"Right after they come back from the market."  That Saturday, we
were all there to help Mrs. Galla bring in the groceries.  What a
combo -- a candy bar and watching the layout come alive.  It would
be dismantled and moved to the attic just after the new year.  That
was always a day of sadness.

         And then one September, Jay went off to Stanford to become
an architect and we moved to Boonton, the town for which the DL&W
line was named.  With Jay gone, there wasn't any reason for us kids
to go back.  We never did.  The DL&W finally shut down the Towaco
station in 1963, forcing commuters to buy their tickets at the
other end of the line.  Ronnie went to work for Morris County. 
Garro became a civil engineer.  We missed bumping into one another
in Aswan, Egypt, many years later by five days.

         On days like today, when I think about curtain stretchers
and Charlie and Ronnie Mazzucco and Bill Garro's off-limits GG-1
and those summer days along the Lackawanna tracks, I often wonder
what became of that Lionel Brigadoon that spent its Decembers in
the Galla's living room.

         I hope, like the legendary Scottish village, it is simply
asleep and not gone.