The Wyoming Valley & Western Railway is an HO scale freelance railroad created by Sam Meehan. It is modeled around the year 2010. In this era, the railroad rosters a wide variety of mainly 2nd generation EMD diesels.

THE MODELING STORY:

The story of the Wyoming Valley & Western begins in the early 1980s when Conrail decided to sell off a cluster of branch lines and industrial track in the Wilkes-Barre, PA area.

An investment firm by the name of S.M. Creative Holdings was interested in entering the transportation industry and would purchase the cluster from Conrail. A new company, named the Wyoming Valley & Western Railway, would then begin operations in June 1981. Shortly after this, the new short line would also acquire a short segment of D&H trackage from Butler St. in Wilkes-Barre, to the connection with Hudson Yard a few miles north.

The WV&W was quite a busy short line upon startup, as many customers in the area returned to rail service after a hiatus due to poor service from Conrail. The WV&W attracted even more business through frequent service. This prompted the D&H to leave a portion of their Hudson Yard open for interchange traffic after they moved operations to Taylor Yard near Scranton.

Once the D&H was declared bankrupt and put up for sale at the end of the 1980s, SMC pursued a buyout as a way to expand and solve the service disruption issues the WV&W was facing. The purchase was approved in 1990 and the WV&W would take ownership of all remaining D&H trackage, locomotives, and trackage rights in April 1991.

As the Conrail split became a reality and was fast approaching, Norfolk Southern was already looking for ways to enter new markets and divest of redundant trackage. The newly expanded WV&W was their ticket into Montreal to interchange with CN as well as a shortcut to Allentown from Binghamton. An agreement was reached by mid 1998 that would result in the sale of Conrail’s Buffalo Line as well as a portion of the former Erie mainline some time after the split, which NS had deemed redundant to their system. In turn, NS was granted trackage rights across the WV&W system between Harrisburg, PA, and Rouses Point, NY. The WV&W would take control of the buffalo line just over one year after the Conrail split in July of 2000.

The WV&W would go on to operate this system into the present day. Gradually increasing traffic volumes system wide has made the WV&W a particularly busy regional railroad by the 2010s, with pool traffic stretching across the country. Several batches of second hand locomotives were acquired from various sources since the 1990s to handle the expansion. The most common type of traffic moved across the system is manufacturing goods, especially in the Wyoming Valley. Other common commodities hauled across the system include sand, LPG, ethanol, coke, stone/materials, grain, coal, and intermodal.