Rochester & Sodus Bay Railway

In the trench.

The other day I finished a booklet (above) by William Reed Gordon about Rochester & Sodus Bay Railway.
Rochester & Sodus Bay was only a trolley-line, more precisely an interurban, using cars somewhat larger and faster than city trolleys. The cars were electrically powered by overhead wire.
Rochester & Sodus Bay wasn’t as serious as railroading can be. Grades were often too steep for serious railroading, plus track curvature also tended to be extreme.
Anything by William Reed Gordon is not scholarly. Gordon was a railfan heavily into trolleys. I have many of his books. Most are collections of trolley-based arcana only marginally organized.
Gordon once worked for Rochester & Sodus Bay. The booklet is his most organized. There are numerous ancient photographs of trolleys seemingly unrelated to text.


Along the old Ridge Road.

What text there is was cribbed from old newspaper stories, and interviews with ex-Rochester & Sodus Bay workers.
First was a railroad to an amusement park on Irondequoit Bay. The bay was once the outlet of the Genesee River, but ice-age glaciers rerouted that river.
The bay still exists, but that amusement park is long-gone. Railroad was built from where the bus-barns are now on East Main Street in Rochester down to that amusement park.
Not much of that right-of-way still exists, but my wife and I traced it on bicycle years ago. We followed that right-of-way from the bus-barns to what is now Empire Boulevard — it was Clifford Street then.
That railroad was steam narrow-gauge at first, but converted to electrically-powered standard-gauge interurban cars.
From Empire the right-of-way is pretty much obliterated, but down near the bay the watery trench it traveled is still there. That defile was probably there in the first place, and now it’s returning to as it was before the railroad. There used to be houses, but they’re gone.


To left is the amusement park; to right is toward Sodus.

Promoters decided to extend the railroad east. A junction was put in near the amusement park. Railroad to the amusement park remained, but past the junction the railroad climbed out of Irondequoit defile, then went east through West Webster and Webster toward Sodus.
Residents didn’t expect the railroad to get past Webster, but it did. All the way to Sodus, then Sodus Point north of Sodus Bay: 41.12 miles.
Gordon included a newspaper article containing the hoary chestnut about evil Henry Ford and his Model-T putting interurbans out of business. But to me other things were at play.
—1) Railroading was such a success at first because it gave reliable footing to wheels. Roads, which were dirt, rutted when wet, and often became sloughs of despond. Wagons bogged down in the ruts, especially the mud.
Railroad track, though confining, rendered excellent footing to wheels. Shipping became slam-dunk. Every town wanted a railroad.
Now roads are much better. They’re paved, no longer the dirt that mired wheels.
Railroads can still ship incredible tonnage. You can’t trailer 120 trailer-bodies on a highway — highways aren’t fixed guideways like railroad track.
And 120 tons of coal, the current capacity of a single railroad coal-car, would collapse the highway.
But highways have the advantage portal-to-portal. With railroad one has to build a siding to a nearby railroad. This limits location.
And roads became prolific. The fact they’re paved means heavy loads can be shipped.
—2) Railroad shipping has to be wherever the railroad goes. No longer are railroads shipping small quantities of freight. Railroads are now shipping gigantic quantities of similar freight, e.g. long trains loaded with automobiles, 15,000 tons of coal, unit-trains entirely of crude-oil, ethanol or grain, or hundreds of double-stacked freight containers from overseas or domestic shipping.
Small freight shipments were turned over to trucking, which is more flexible anyway. Factories no longer locate next to a railroad; they rely on trucking. Many old railroad branch-lines were abandoned or turned over to gumint authorities. What remains are the main stems moving vast quantities of similar freight.
Paved roads are now in places that easily bypass railroading.
This also happens moving people. All I hafta do is buy and maintain an automobile, and I can drive from my garage directly to my destination.
Factor in railroading, and I complicate. Fort Lauderdale, FL, would mean -a) getting to the railroad, and -b) being picked up or renting a car in Fort Lauderdale. Theoretically I could drive directly to my niece’s house in Fort Lauderdale.
Gordon has a point — rumor has it General Motors bought all the trolley services to better market its buses.
Uhm, track for those trolleys is privately maintained; right-of-way for buses is public; it’s not maintained by the transit company. Plus, a trolley can’t detour, or just go around an accident. It follows the track.
For Old Henry to make a killing, there had to be a market. Portal-to-portal is much more attractive, and highways are much better now than when the Model-T was engineered.
Rochester & Sodus Bay ended in 1929. By then Ridge Road was improved.
When I began driving bus in 1977, we still ran bus-service to Sodus. That was probably per the franchise for Rochester & Sodus Bay Railway. Regional Transit Service, my employer, succeeded Rochester Transit Corporation, which succeeded New York State Railways, which came to include Rochester & Sodus Bay Railway.
Hundreds of times I drove bus to Webster, the location of Xerox. My route was that of Rochester & Sodus Bay Railway east of Irondequoit Bay, but never as far as Sodus. Only Webster — it was 3005, Transit-readers.
3005 was a pleasant ride, especially in apple-blossom season. Rochester & Sodus Bay was also called “the Apple-Blossom route.” It passed many apple orchards. That picture of the railroad next to Ridge Road appears to be next to an apple orchard.

• The “Genesee River” is a fairly large river that runs south-to-north across Western New York, runs through Rochester, including over falls, and empties into Lake Ontario. Its valley was our nation’s first bread-basket — it had a canal that fed into the Erie Canal in Rochester. Grain was also milled in Rochester with water-power.
• RE: “the bus-barns.....” —For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. I recovered well enough to return to work at a newspaper; I retired from that over 12 years ago. “The Barns” were where buses were stored inside.