The Day the Trains Stopped Coming: Greenwood’s Farewell to the Rails

In the green valleys of Steuben County, New York, the village of Greenwood once thrived on the steady pulse of the railroad. The New York & Pennsylvania Railroad (NY&P) came through in the 1890s, connecting the little farming and lumbering towns between Addison and Whitesville. It was a modest line — a string of depots, trestles, and sidings hugging Bennetts Creek — but for half a century, it was Greenwood’s lifeline.

Freight cars carried milk, lumber, livestock, and slate from the surrounding hills. Passenger coaches linked the town to Hornell and Addison, and from there to the great rail hubs beyond. The whistle’s call echoed through the valley each morning — as constant and familiar as the church bell or the creak of the mill wheel.

By the 1930s, though, the world had changed. The Depression cut deeply into local industries, trucks began to outcompete trains for short hauls, and cars carried people where locomotives once did. The NY&P, which had always operated on narrow margins, found itself in ruin. In 1936, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which controlled the line through leases and partial ownership, petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to abandon the Greenwood Branch.

The ICC, charged with balancing public need against economic reality, dispatched inspectors to study the case. Their report was clinical: freight revenues had collapsed; maintenance costs outstripped income; there were no shippers left to justify the trains. Despite protests from Greenwood residents and merchants, the Commission ruled that the line was “uneconomic to operate” and formally approved the abandonment in June 1936 (ICC Finance Docket No. 10537, Pennsylvania Railroad Co.—Abandonment—Greenwood Branch, decided May 1936).

The final train rolled through Greenwood shortly afterward — a short consist of mixed freight and a single coach. The townspeople came out to see it off. Farmers in overalls stood beside shopkeepers and schoolchildren, all silent as the locomotive slowed by the depot one last time. The engineer leaned from the cab, gave a long, lingering whistle, and waved. The echo of that whistle lingered in the valley long after the train had vanished around the bend toward Andover.

By autumn, work crews were pulling up the rails. The little depot stood empty, its freight platform sagging where milk cans once waited for the morning pickup. Without the railroad, Greenwood’s link to the world was severed. Businesses that had relied on the line faltered, and young people began leaving for Hornell, Elmira, and beyond.

Today, the railroad is gone — its grade softened by grass and time. A few stone culverts and weathered bridge abutments mark where the line once ran. On summer evenings, when the air is still and the hills are quiet, locals say you can almost hear it again: that last mournful whistle from June 1936 — the sound of progress leaving town.

Greenwood’s experience was emblematic of hundreds of small towns across the Northeast during the 1930s, where the ICC’s decisions — intended to streamline struggling rail systems — effectively ended an era of rural rail service. Today, the faint traces of the NY&P right-of-way remain visible in the landscape, a quiet reminder of the days when the railroad carried not only goods and passengers, but the heartbeat of the community itself.