Atlantic City Line - History

History

In the 19th and early 20th century, Atlantic City was the major seaside vacation destination for the Philadelphia area for both wealthy and working class alike. Similar to Coney Island in New York, the popularity of Atlantic City was made possible by rail transport providing inexpensive service between the city where people lived and the seashore where they played. By its height in the 1920s there were no fewer than three competing railroad Main Lines connecting the Atlantic City resort with Philadelphia, the Atlantic City Railroad (ACRR), owned by the Reading Company, the Camden and Atlantic (C&A) and the West Jersey and Seashore (WJ&S), both owned by the PRR. Competition was fierce and the ACRR and C&A lines boasted some of the fastest trains in the world, while the WJ&S was a pioneering example of railroad electrification.

The Great Depression caused the first consolidation of the various competing lines into the new Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines (PRSL), but the post-war rise of the automobile and the Atlantic City Expressway not only caused people to abandon the railroad for their cars, but also to abandon Atlantic City for more exotic vacation destinations. By the late 1960s, the surviving former Camden and Atlantic Main Line was reduced to a commuter service funded by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDoT) running trains of Budd RDC railcars operating from a small terminal at the Lindenwold PATCO station. Conrail took over from the PRSL in 1976, maintaining service between Lindenwold and Atlantic City, Ocean City and Cape May. By 1983, the federally-dependent railroad was ordered to cease operating its contracted commuter rail services. NJDoT used this as an opportunity to terminate the chronically under-performing South Jersey rail services.

Almost immediately, there was talk of restoring the line to Atlantic City. Casino gambling had brought the aging resort back from the brink of financial collapse and local politicians were irritated that most railway transportation projects benefited the more populous northern portion of the state. A deal with Amtrak was worked out where the line, suffering from decades of deferred maintenance and, in places, outright abandonment, would be completely rebuilt for a new Amtrak service. Dubbed the "Gambler's Express," service connected Atlantic City with cities up and down the Northeast Corridor as well as a local commuter service run by NJT.