PRSL: The Consumers in Westville.

Continuing our customer freight focus we now turn our attention to the good people in Westville and again ask the question: what shipments are ready to be delivered, picked up, or forwarded?

Ah, the town of my youth (from birth to 3rd grade) and of my home churches for 40+ years. The town touted itself as the gateway to south jersey with good reason. Roads entering from Camden (the closest Delaware river access) would cross Big Timber Creek on a wooden trestle into Westville and then fan out in multiple directions leading to all the south Jersey towns and hamlets.

Timber Trestle Over Big Timber Creek

In the early 50s Westville had 6 private sidings and a team track that served 18 different shippers for feed, livestock, farm supplies, and lumber. Today only the spur to what used to be the oil refinery remains. We start with another of my convenient time warps. In 1906 the Pennsylvania RR built a power plant here to power the outside rail electric commuter service on the Millville branch. It had 5 tracks serving it coal and supplies. In 1924 the local power company made them an offer for cheaper electric that they coulndn't refuse so the plant shut down. Electric commuter service continued through WWII. The plant was finally torn down round the turn of the century. For my purposes the plant continued to serve into the 1950s and I have a single siding to service it with multiple coal cars 4 days a week and an occasional box car of supplies. They all leave empty. No coal, no commuter service! Get it!

PRSL (PRR) Power Plant in Westville

Another spur (the lead of which is the team track) services the Buzby Brothers cement company. Gondolas of sand and covered hoppers of cement flow in (and return empty). Its cement mixer trucks fan out from there, for this is the early 1950s and south Jersey is being webbed with many new interstates highways per President Eisenhower (just a tiny time warp). (All of which needed to provide multiple mile long straight sections in case it was necessary to land jet fighters in emergencies if the post WWII cold war continued to heat up with the Russians.) No sand and cement, no highways!

Buzby Bros.

Westville Team Track

We have already referred to the team track traffic, so let's go over to the Barry Bros. coal trestle. As a strong childhood memory I can still visualize a coal hopper on the trestle sporting a huge B&O logo. They supplied the bulk of the town with the coal needed, for then every home was heated with a monsterous octopus like coal furnace in their basement. Coal would be dumped through the trestle's open floor (held 2 hopper cars) into piles, A conveyor belt would scoop it up into dump trucks which then visited each home. They would spread their big metal slides out from the truck and shovel the coal which would travel down the slides into an open basement window and a cellar coal bin. Dads would stoke the furnace located on the dirt basement floors with coal in the morning and then in the evening before bed time to keep the house cozy in the winter. We would snuggle on the sofa on the winter evenings to watch those new-fangled tiny (in a huge console) black and white television sets. When the set would fail we would go next door to the local grocer and plug each TV vacuum tube into their testing machine to find out which one went bad this time and get the proper replacement to plug back in so Howdy Doody, the Mickey Mouse Club, Sally Starr, and Winky Dink could be brought back on air. No coal, the residents freeze!

Barry Bros. Coal Trestle

Next came the Texaco siding. Previously the spur had serviced land owned by Campbell Soup to grow tomatoes and produce for company factory in Camden. Then Texaco built a huge oil refinery there. Its spur currently goes off layout (but will soon have a small refinery intruding into the aisle (North Shore kit, fence, and a Blair animated Texaco sign.) This spur is serviced by the Bulson Street tank sweeper we referred to last blog. It will switch the Texaco refinery and go through Woodbury and down the Penns Grove branch to service the off-line Sunoco refinery in Paulsboro. No tank cars, and your automobile doesn't run!

Texaco Refinery (under construction)

Finally in South Westville another spur got repurposed. Originally 2 sidings served lumber companies there. Decades later a Del Monte distribution plant took its place. And thanks to another convenient time warp, it receives reefers of frozen foods and an occasional box car of supplies (cardboard boxes. etc.). (A barber and news store was across the street and one of the town's fire companies was at the other corner.) No food, the people starve!