New Jersey Southern Railroad
[1] This first section included what would remain the two largest engineering works on the line: the long pier at Port Monmouth and the Navesink River bridge at Red Bank.
[4] The route passed through the center of the lightly populated Pine Barrens, and was connected to towns on Barnegat Bay only by stages running on public roads.
[6] As roundabout as it was, this service caused controversy because it broke the state-authorized monopoly of the Camden and Amboy Railroad for travel between Jersey City and Philadelphia.
He had first taken over the Long Branch and Sea Shore Railroad, when it was of no further interest to the Camden and Amboy, and improved it by extending it farther north on Sandy Hook to Horse Shoe Cove.
The Horse Shoe Cove dock was more sheltered than Port Monmouth, and its better access to Long Branch made it the preferred route for the combined railroads.
Trains now ran through from Sandy Hook to Long Branch to Eatontown Junction and from there down the NJS main line to southern New Jersey.
[13] The only lengthy NJS branch in south Jersey ran from Bridgeton to a place called Bivalve, on the Maurice River in Port Norris.
The NJS did not acquire this line until 1887, after the B&PN company had failed and it was reorganized as the Cumberland and Maurice River Railroad.
[17] The time by rail from New York (including a ten-minute ferry ride to Jersey City) was about 1 hour 40 minutes.
The "bay route" to Sandy Hook took about 2 hours but writers of the period considered it the more pleasant journey, at least in good weather.
The rail portion of the new route ran from Sandy Hook via Long Branch, Eatontown, Whitings, and Pemberton to Camden.
The Pennsylvania likewise rerouted the trains from Philadelphia off the NJS in 1880, running instead by a new line to Sea Girt and then up the new NY&LB.
The old NJS main line from Port Monmouth to Red Bank was downgraded to a branch with minimal train service.
[21] The connection between Atlantic Highlands and the New Jersey Southern routes was made in 1892 with the construction of a railroad bridge over the Shrewsbury River and the closing of the Sandy Hook boat docks.
Sandy Hook was a military base, Fort Hancock, and more land was now needed for weapons testing, so the dock and railroad that had been allowed on the federal property now had to go.
Any hopes for a resumption of service after the war had been dashed when a hurricane in September 1944 destroyed both the Atlantic Highlands pier and parts of the railroad along the shore to the Shrewsbury River.
Passenger service from Highlands over the Shrewsbury River bridge and south to East Long Branch was eliminated in 1945.
Although this section has been closed for over a century, it can still be traced easily in satellite images by following power line right of ways from the Navesink River between Red Bank and Middletown just east of NJ State Route 35, north across Middletown and through Belford, then towards the shore of Port Monmouth east of the existing pier.
Satellite images also reveal a branch in the Compton Creek marshes heading east towards previous and current fish processing facilities.
"The first direct fast train ever run from New-York to Atlantic City" was inaugurated in January 1889, running down the New York and Long Branch Railroad to Red Bank, the Southern Division to Winslow Junction, and the Atlantic City Railroad, which was acquired by the CNJ in 1883 (and later transferred to the Reading Company).
The service was rerouted to the former Camden and Atlantic Railroad line in 1933 when the Pennsylvania Railroad and Reading Company system's combined their southern New Jersey services as the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, and the Blue Comet was cut back in 1934 to one round trip a day except in the summer, because of economic conditions.
[33] A timetable of May 1945 shows passenger service cut back to two round trips a day from Jersey City to Red Bank, down the NJS to Lakehurst, and the Toms River branch to Barnegat.
Conrail began closing segments of the former NJS, and in 1978 severed the main line by abandoning the stretch through the Pine Barrens from Lakehurst to Winslow Junction.
New Jersey Transit proposed passenger service over parts of the NJS in 1996 as a project called MOM (Monmouth Ocean Middlesex).
The Boards of Chosen Freeholders (county governments) for Monmouth and Ocean Counties both announced a preference in 2006 for the Monmouth Junction routing, which branches off the Northeast Corridor Line south of New Brunswick and runs over what is now a freight line via Jamesburg and Freehold, entering the former NJS at Farmingdale.
[36] The Middlesex County Board of Chosen Freeholders opposed the Monmouth Junction routing, and received support from Governor Jon Corzine early in 2008.
In September 2008, objections were raised for the first time to the routing based on its path across Monmouth Battlefield State Park.
