The line ran from the Carousel Center (today's Destiny USA) on the city's north side via Armory Square and Syracuse University to Colvin Street, with summer weekend service south to Jamesville, mainly using 1950s-era diesel railcars.

Although OnTrack was initially successful, ridership declined and was ultimately discontinued due to inadequate rush hour service, poor publicity and failure to connect to Syracuse's Amtrak and intercity bus routes.

[5][6] Starting in the late 19th century, an extensive series of electric interurban railways served the Syracuse region, but by the 1930s local rail service ceased, and was replaced by buses and automobiles.

[7] In the 1990s, Syracuse University graduate Robert Colucci proposed converting for passenger service a roughly 10-mile (16 km) segment of the old Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad's Syracuse–Binghamton line[3] between Carousel Center (now Destiny USA) in the north and Jamesville in the south.

[8] At the time, the little-used right of way was owned by Conrail which considered it a financial burden, so it was sold for $1 to the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency (IDA).

[14] This would require the construction of a new bridge over Park Street (State Route 370), so that local trains would not interfere with operations on the CSX (formerly New York Central) main line.

[16] However, CSX objected due to concerns that construction might destabilize the adjacent freight rail bridge across Park Avenue.

[3] It was found that NYSW had used large amounts of state grants and tax breaks to fund freight service and repair track on its other lines, rather than for OnTrack as the money had been intended.

[5] The OnTrack route starts at Destiny USA in the north, and runs along the south shore of Onondaga Lake and under I-690 before turning southeast through the Westside neighborhoods of Syracuse, roughly paralleling Erie Boulevard.

Within Syracuse, the line passes through a mix of residential, commercial, retail and light industrial areas; south of Brighton Avenue and the city limits it traverses mostly undeveloped rural land.

The section south of Syracuse University was only used by special excursion trains, although in 1999 when parts of Interstate 81 were temporarily closed for construction, the federal government briefly subsidized free commuter service between Jamesville and downtown.

[1] All OnTrack cars were owned by the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway and returned to NYSW upon the demise of the commuter rail service.