Nicholson Cutoff

The Nicholson Cutoff (also known as the Clark's Summit-Hallstead Cutoff) is a railroad segment of the Sunbury Line rail line and formerly a railroad segment of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad main line and the Delaware and Hudson Railway South Line. The Nicholson Cutoff and the rest of the Sunbury Line is owned by Norfolk Southern Railway. The Nicholson Cutoff was once a rail line until it became part of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western main line.

The Nicholson Cutoff was built by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad to replace the original Lackawanna line between Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, and Hallstead, Pennsylvania. In surveying potential routes for the new line, the Lackawanna investigated the possibility of building a line directly from Clarks Summit to Nichols, New York, bypassing Binghamton, New York. This alignment would have shaved 20 miles (32 km) off the existing route between these two points, but was deemed impractical not only because it would have bypassed a major junction point on the railroad, but also because of the amount of cutting and filling that would have been needed to build this route. As about half of the old line was curved track, a major rationale for building the new line would be to "straighten-out" the route. The new route, the cutoff, would ultimately eliminate two-thirds of this curvature, 2400 degrees, the equivalent of more than six and a half circles. Nearly all the remaining curves would be 2° (2,864.75 ft or 873.18 m radius) or less, permitting 70 mph (113 km/h) or greater for passenger trains. This was a decided improvement over the curves on the old route, some of which exceeded 6° (955.37 ft or 291.20 m radius, restricting trains to 35 mph or 56 km/h).

Construction on the Nicholson Cutoff started in May 1912 and the first revenue train to run over the line was on November 6, 1915. While the new 39.6-mile (63.7 km) line resulted only in a modest savings in travel distance (3.6 miles or 5.8 km) the cutoff saved a significant amount of travel time between Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Binghamton, New York, especially for freight trains. Before the building of the cutoff, heavy westbound coal trains, bringing anthracite coal from Scranton, required pushers to be added in three different locations—LaPlume, Nicholson, and Hallstead—once they got past the top of the grade at Clarks Summit. The new line eliminated the need for these additional engines and crews, not to mention that these trains no longer needed to stop for the pushers to be added.

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