Waterloo Village - Unheralded Saviors

Unheralded Saviors

This might have been the end of the story for Waterloo, particularly if the hamlet had really been abandoned, as local vandals might have burned the town to the ground if it had become completely unoccupied. But the village's location, within a short distance of the Lackawanna Railroad (which had to overcome a steep eastbound grade towards New York near Waterloo, slowing freight trains to a crawl as they labored up the hill to Netcong), made it easy for hobos to jump on and off boxcars.

The hobos, as it turned out, had "discovered" Waterloo and had adopted it as a stopping off point in their cross-country journey towards New York. This new purpose for the village wasn't all that different from its original purpose a century earlier. The hobos protected Waterloo Village by occupying it throughout the 1930s and '40s. The original Waterloo railroad station was moved from the station site during the 1940s and became a private residence on U.S. Route 206 in Mount Olive Township, New Jersey.