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From: tommy meehan tmeehan0421 AT gmail DOT com
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:58:25 -0500
Subject: Piermont NY Station - Northern Branch
"Piermont_Area_Map.jpg" - image/jpeg, 452x398 (24bit)

I am greatly enjoying the series of photos Pat McKnight has been posting
for us "Erie fans.: I was especially interested in photo B-033 in Digest
#5937. This is a photo of the Piermont NY station on the old Nyack &
Southern line of the Northern Branch.

http://lists.railfan.net/erielackphoto.cgi?erielack-03-04-17/B-33.jpg

Piermont has a long history with the Erie Railroad and the village has
restored the train station. I'm attaching a photo, taken in 2013, and it
doesn't look much different today than it did in 1909! I'm also attaching a
map from an Erie timetable showing how the original New York & Erie main
line (downgraded to the Piermont Branch after 1869) crossed over the
Northern Branch south of the Piermont station. There is also some recorded
history having to do with the station and its longtime agent, Belle Byram
Kelly. She spent thirty-two years as the agent, from 1908 to 1940. That
latter year was when they reduced Northern Branch passenger schedules to
three rush hour trains each way and I think most of the station agencies
were closed. Interestingly, in the photo Pat McKnight posted from 1909,
Belle was probably inside the station when the photo was taken.

Here's a story about her son, Tom Kelly Jr., written in 1991 when he still
lived in the station:
===================

*PIERMONT, N.Y.— *Tom Kelly sat in a lawn chair, clutching his day's mail,
a third-class offer to subscribe to Smithsonian. He gasped for air. It had
taken five minutes to shuffle 30 feet to his mailbox. It would be 10
minutes before he felt sufficiently strong to shuffle indoors. "I'm not
feeling well," Mr. Kelly explained. "I'm never feeling well."

Tom Kelly [lives] in the old Piermont station along the Erie Lackawanna
railroad right of way, high on the west bank of the Hudson River. It's been
a quarter-century since a train rumbled through. The tracks are long gone.
But the memories live on -- well, most of them. And so does Tom Kelly. Mr.
Kelly, who is 75 years old, has seen better days. So has the station, whose
weathered wooden sides have faced more than 110 winters. The roof is
crumbling. The paint is badly pitted. The yard is overgrown. The windows
are papered over. "This old station and I are falling apart together," said
Mr. Kelly, laughing and then wheezing. It's the cigarettes, though he quit
10 years ago.

He was born in the station, upstairs, at 4:40 A.M. on a dark September
morning in 1915, 20 minutes before old Doc Leitner made it up the hill,
swearing up his usual storm. Mr. Kelly grew up in the station, running home
from school to make kindling and haul water from a nearby house. Mrs. Kelly
-- everyone called her Belle -- was station agent, a working woman before
that was common. She sold tickets, kept the books, tapped out telegrams.

She arrived in 1908 as the new agent, cold, covered in coal dust, but eager
to work at least 12-hour shifts. "What a gutsy, terrific dame!" said Mr.
Kelly. In 1913, after a romance conducted in Morse code with the night
telegrapher up in Nyack, Belle married him -- Thomas Kelly. Tom was their
only child. He has difficulty remembering his father. Tom recalls the tall,
wavy-haired man taking him to a baseball game, his long arm wrapped around
the 4-year-old boy in the bleachers, sharing a sandwich in the sunshine.
Tom also remembers, soon after, being led to his father's bedside upstairs
in the station. The man tousled his son's hair. "Be a good boy," he said.
Then the station was full of flowers. Tom is clearing his throat now.
Probably the cigarettes.

He remembers his mother running the station until 1940 and then the
Rutherford, N.J., depot until 1959. After Belle Kelly's retirement, she
returned to Piermont. She and her son bought the abandoned station and
moved back in together, like the old days only without all the trains and
people and life. Her health failed steadily -- strokes, paralysis,
incontinence, comas. Mr. Kelly cared for her day and night. She lay in the
waiting room. He slept in the old office so he could watch her through the
ticket window. In 1976, Belle Kelly died…at 88. Mr. Kelly turned the dim
station into an affectionately cluttered museum to railroading and his mom.
No one visits anymore.

=================================
Here's short piece about Belle Kelly from the local history website:

*Belle Kelly - Piermont's Legendary Telegrapher *

Marian Belle Byram came to Piermont in 1908 from Watkins Glen, NY. Just 20
years old, she had already been trained by the Erie Railroad in the art of
telegraphy and assumed the duties of ticket agent and telegrapher, here, at
the busy Piermont Station of the Northern Railroad.

Women had been working as agents and telegraphers since the mid-1800s,
mostly in small rural railroad stations, and have been referred to as some
of the earliest telecommunications workers in America. They held complex
and demanding jobs, and participated fully in an important chapter in the
development of transportation and communications in the country. Belle
Kelly was an example of the strong and courageous young women who left home
at an early age to go work on the railroad.

Telegraphers got to know each other personally over the wire. Most used
code names like “Lightening”, “134” and “Magenta”. They could recognize
each other through what was referred to as “the fist” or their own unique
cadence of their "dots" and "dashes". Insiders called it "the touch" and
Belle loved what she heard from the telegrapher from Nyack before she ever
saw him face to face. Before long, the Nyack telegrapher, Thomas Kelly, was
courting Belle.

Belle and Thomas were married in 1913. Two years later they had a son, also
named Thomas. Belle gave birth on the second floor of the train station in
September 1915. Young Tom was only 4 years old when Belle was left a widow
after Thomas Kelly died at the age of 30.

Along with a young child and a round-the-clock job, Belle continued life in
the upstairs apartment, which for many years had no running water for
drinking, cooking or bathing. Tom remembered coming home from school “to
make kindling and haul water from a nearby house.”

As ticket agent she was responsible for keeping track of all the trunks and
baggage moving through the station when Piermont was a bustling resort
town, and she managed ticket orders for as many as 48 trains a day. She
sent and received stacks of messages for the paperboard factory, and
functioned as the station’s bookkeeper as well. Newsflashes came via the
telegraph at the time, and in later years Tom Kelly reminisced proudly
saying that “all the kids used to come up to the station to get baseball
scores. On election night, the company would send up a special operator” to
help keep up with the flood of information.

After 32 years in Piermont, in 1940, Belle Kelly moved to a new position as
ticket agent for the Erie’s Main Line in Rutherford, N.J. and remained
there until retirement in 1959. She worked for a total of 51 years for the
Erie Railroad. In 1966 the last train ran through Piermont. The railroad
shut down and the tracks were taken up. But an attachment to the old
station survived. In 1969, Tom Kelly bought the building and over time
refurbished the downstairs of the station to make it a more livable space
for his mother to return to in her final years. Belle became ill and
increasingly frail, and died at Summit Park Hospital in Pomona at the age
of 88 in May of 1976.

===============================


tommy meehan


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