Honesdale Political Candidate Loses House Bid

One of the driving personalities for a link between NYC and Honesdale has lost his bid for the PA House of Representatives.

Had he won, Orlando Marrero was poised to make the best of his position to advance the plan.

As it is, Marrero was buried by his incumbent Republican opponent Michael Peifer who received 65% of the vote over Marrero's 35%.

Marrero had already indicated in the original piece that, should he lose, he would continue to work to make the project happen along with the other vision principal Tom Myles,  Chief Executive Officer of the DL&S railroad which currently operates an excursion line.

According to the original story there was to be a November 12 meeting with operators of the New York Southern & Western Railroad in what is cited by Myles as a "relationship" building exercise.  However I am having difficulty in culling anything online that may have resulted from that meeting.

Honesdale Horns In On Area NYC Rail Plans

A report published at the Wayne Independent discusses -- discussion -- for reigniting passenger rail service between Honesdale and New York City.

Full report:  Commuter Train Service Explored.

As the story itself notes there are of course plans and actual material work being done to advance rail, however slowly, to the Poconos, with Scranton as an eventual terminus (to be replaced in title by Wilkes-Barre sometime thereafter if not immediately).


Honesdale is, as the Google Map crow flies, 53 minutes from Wilkes-Barre, so a comfortable slip into Manhattan on modern rail would include that overhead should such musings for Honesdale gain any traction.

Who Are These People

Tom Myles, an experienced manager of passenger rail systems, along with present day PA House of Representatives candidate Orlando Marrero, are the apparent personality drivers for the idea.

Giving significant muscle to the Honesdale version of the NYC/NEPA rail dream is Myle's current role as the Chief Executive Officer of the Delaware Lackawaxen & Stourbridge (DL&S), an excursion rail line; and, depending on the outcome of this Tuesday's elections, Marrero's place and voice in the State government.

Working together, they might get it done.

Scranton Problem Not Their Problem

But then again, the reason Pennsylvania's side of the current Lackawanna-Cutoff Restoration Project is not already barreling toward a connection to Scranton or just the Poconos of course is pure lack of money.  Despite a bevy of support from such current political figures as Matt Cartwright, for example, there has been no serious action in putting forth the billions of dollars necessary to make that connection a reality.

Myles believes to the extent that money is the problem, it's because of the extra infrastructure necessary to bring the current plan of a line to Scranton.

And that's where Honesdale has a card to play.

Myles noted that an effort has been underway for at least 25 years to re-establish passenger services from Scranton to New York. That project would cost about ”$2 billion,” he said, due to the need to rebuild a railroad bridge over the Delaware and restore trackage that was removed in New Jersey. Unlike that project, Myles said, there is “continuous trackage” in place from Honesdale to New York City.

Also notable in Myle's vision is the perhaps more affordable -- though perhaps logistically questionable -- reliance on light rail cars to make the major leg connection(s) to any New Jersey station, versus "heavy rail" cars traditionally associated with commuter systems of the scale being discussed.

Light rail as this author understands it is more suitable and designed with a city or regional scope in mind, though in totality perhaps the jaunt between Honesdale and Andover are in fact nothing more than a regional connection, state lines be damned.

It will be interesting to see how this advances.  Could we have a parallel option to the slogging Lackawanna Cut-Off?  How would NEPA commuters out of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre feel about a commute to Honesdale over Scranton or a terminus right out of Public Square?

Wilkes-Barre Rail Now On (sigh) Blogger

Welcome to the now Blogger hosted Wilkes-Barre Rail.

I realize I'm speaking to a largely dead audience here, at least to any that has a sense of the blog's history over the past three years.  However, the migration to a pedestrian blogging platform like Blogger is a painful concession for me.  Previously I hosted WBRAIL on my own custom-written platform Battle Blog.

I've been long resistant to blogging on a polished professional platform in favor of my own engine because I didn't want to give up the absolute code-level control (oh, and let's be clear, there was nothing unpolished or unprofessional about my platform -- it evolved to look like all others at the end of the day.  It's just that its mechanics were falling apart as web methodologies were changing).  Battle Blog did things even products like WordPress don't do, things they'd want to if I had the ear of their various project or engineering teams.

But alas.  The times have caught up to me.  Maintaining my own engine which was not, shall we say, well incorporated with today's web and blogging landscape, was disconnecting my content from search and easy audience access.  By moving to an actual blogging platform written by others I have instant mobile outreach and clean search engine indexing.

Why Blogger

With so few people left roaming the open WWW to recognize any distinction, I seriously doubt that many will be so inquisitive as to ask why I chose Google's Blogger and not, say, Wordpress or perhaps Tumblr.

The answer is that for my range of publishing and objectives there is virtually no difference between them, save for one.  I am a G Suites subscriber which means I am a "professional class" Google user who pays a small monthly subscription fee to Google for its entire range of products and services for extra features, and sans advertisements.  By contrast, you are probably a "free Google account" user as most people simply are.

As a G Suites subscriber I feel that I am taking ready advantage of a service that is pre-aligned with the IT of my small "business", Dave the Web Guy Innovations.  Were I to skit out to another third party blogging service it would be instantly split from the center of my business and day to day activities within the Google framework.  And, since all blogging engines render blogs that look and behave the same, there's no question of quality or feature ability one way or another.

For me, Blogger just makes the best sense.

Stay Off the Grass for Now

I'm still learning the nuances of Blogger and things here and there "just ain't right" yet.  I'd avoid commenting until I decide how I'm going to handle that.  I'd like to incorporate the Disqus engine, if I allow commenting at all.

I also have three years of previous Wilkes-Barre Rail content that in some shape or form I'd like to re-post in order to give each new visitor a more robust sense of its history.  But of course each of those posts was written and presented in a different time.  As such, you're likely to begin seeing a library of posts prior to this actual first one, as I enter them and then back-date their entry times.

So, it's going to be a little crazy for a bit.

That's How Bloggers Roll

WBRAIL in its current form almost died. But in a day of inspiration I've decided to keep it alive and to push forward.

Well damn, let it not be said that blogging is without risk.

Happy 2018 from Wilkes-Barre Rail, and I at least, am not dead yet.  And neither is this blog although I will admit to having come very close to having nixed the blog format in order to carry on with WBRAIL's message and perspective.

I've become very pessimistic about the blogging format for establishing the hope and imagination for some form of rail transit returning to NEPA, a trajectory of doubt made clear by converting WBRAIL's front page into a quasi-static presentation sometime in 2017.

The move unintentionally cleared the way for me to contemplate whether or not maintaining the overhead of a blogging engine was worth it at all, if in fact that's how I planned to use the site.  And that contemplation, for a time, settled on me declaring that WBRAIL would best exist not so much as a web place, but rather a digitally spread web campaign that capitalized on social media channels and existing media content.

But I am a publisher of whim and wonder and at the end of the day I find it difficult to walk away from this small ant hill of a presentation, complete with its accumulation of articles, meager as that be.  Perhaps it is I and my commitment to blogging that needs to change, not the wonderful presentation I've spent so much time building up (much of it while in the throws of temporary unemployment while camped out in my grandmother's house in Miners Mills.  Sentimentally speaking, that means something to me).

So I'm keeping this alive in the form it is in.  My doubts about the impact of blogging or today's web audience which tends to stay off the raw WWW in favor of Facebook and mobile based apps, will diminish as I continue to tweak and master the art of organic gravitation to the maximum extent possible.

My humble apologies to Harold Jenkins of NEPA Blogs for turning his remark into a Thug Life meme (of sorts) above.  You can watch the full context of his comments, which are actually very in depth and tight to the point regarding the craft of blogging, in this June 2, 2011 video interview with ComputerWiseTV.