Getting a Train to East Stroudsburg

Unfortunately, there’s not much of an update on when we’d actually get the rail service people have been waiting for, in some cases for decades. To recap, there are three separate pieces required to restore passenger rail between Scranton and New York. Piece one: NJ Transit is rebuilding the old Lackawanna Cut-Off from Port Morris Junction to a new station in Andover, New Jersey, targeted for late 2026. The tunnel itself is nearly finished, per the most recent reporting, though the station work still ahead has no firm date. That’s the only piece where a contractor has actually been doing visible work, and it still ends about 20 miles short of the Pennsylvania line. Piece two: getting from Andover to the state line means relaying track across the rest of New Jersey and eventually rehabilitating two century-old viaducts over the Paulinskill and Delaware rivers, and by NJ Transit’s own account, that piece has no funding and no timetable. Piece three: once the missing track reaches Pennsylvania, service would run the existing Scranton-to-Slateford freight line, with new stops proposed at Mount Pocono and East Stroudsburg. That’s a separate federal planning process, the FRA’s Corridor ID program, now in the second of three steps, with a public meeting held back in February and no construction date attached. Bottom line: nothing currently underway gets a train closer to Monroe County.