Lake Hopatcong is a commuter railroad station for New Jersey Transit. The station, located in the community of Landing in Roxbury Township, Morris County, New Jersey, United States, serves trains for the Montclair-Boonton Line and Morristown Line at peak hours and on holiday weekends. Service from Lake Hopatcong provides to/from Hackettstown to New York Penn Station and Hoboken Terminal. The stop is located on the tracks below Landing Road (Morris County Route 631) next to the eponymous Lake Hopatcong. The station consists of one active and one abandoned side platform, along with a shelter on the active platform. There is no accessibility for handicapped persons under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Service through the Landing area began on January 16, 1854, for the Morris and Essex Railroad, but there was no stop at the shore of Lake Hopatcong. People who wanted to visit the lake had to get off at nearby Drakesville station and traverse from there to the lake. In 1882, after the Central Railroad of New Jersey built the Wharton and Northern Railroad to Charlotteburgh, there was added incentive to bring a station to the Lake Hopatcong area. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, which took over the Morris and Essex tracks, established a stop in Landing in 1882. In 1910, service began by the Morris County Traction Company, an electric trolley railroad.
The Lackawanna Railroad announced on July 15, 1910, that a new station would be built at Lake Hopatcong, just east of the nearby county bridge. The new station opened on May 28, 1911, a new all-concrete structure with two elevators and a complete walkway on the south side of the Morris Canal. Service on the Lackawanna Cut-Off, a new mainline just west at Port Morris, opened on December 24, 1911. The concrete overpass was demolished in 1982, after being condemned in 1978. The station depot on Landing Road continues to stand.
History
1882 DL&W station
The railroad tracks through Landing were first laid in 1854 by the Morris and Essex Railroad, which was extending its line from Newark westward to Hackettstown. The right-of-way parallelled the three-decade-old Morris Canal past Lake Hopatcong, the canal's leading source of water. At above sea level, the station marked the railroad's highest elevation in New Jersey, which was also the highest point on the canal, which flowed downhill to the Delaware River to the west and the Hudson River to the east. But Landing itself, one of several hamlets that arose to serve the canal's boat crews and mule teams, held no particular promise as a revenue stop, and so no station was built there for about 30 years.
That began to change in 1882, when the Central Railroad of New Jersey opened a station further up the lake and proved that there was money in direct passenger service to a promising vacation spot. Around 1886, the first station in Landing was built by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, a CNJ rival that had taken over the M&E in 1868. The small depot and platforms were sandwiched between the tracks and the canal, requiring most passengers to enter and depart via the steel, cable-stayed Landing Road Bridge. This arrangement, however, did allow passengers to move easily between trains and the steamboats that would take them to lakeshore destinations. A steamboat company, the Black Line, was founded that same year by "the same financial syndicate that owned the Lackawanna Railway and the Morris Canal."
The station also prompted one of several manmade reshapings of Lake Hopatcong. In 1891, when the new White Line steamboat company failed to secure the right to ply the canal, it dredged the swampy, non-navigable southern tip to create Landing Channel and erect a pier a block or so away from the tracks.
1911 DL&W station
By 1906 or so, several factors led the DL&W to plan a new station. First, the area's summer tourist trade was growing as visitors flocked to the lake. Second, the railroad was preparing to begin one of the most ambitious mainline construction projects in the world: the Lackawanna Cut-Off. This new, route through the hills of northern New Jersey, designed to slice an hour off journeys to Scranton and points west and north, would begin at Port Morris Junction, less than a mile to the west.