COMMONWEALTH JUNCTION

Commonwealth Junction was the name of the location where the rails of the Rahway Valley Railroad Company and Rahway Valley Company, Lessee, connected. The latter company was organized to lease and operate the former company in 1909; however, the lessee did construct its own tracks. The lessee constructed the long spur which served the Commonwealth Stone Company quarry. The spur ended at a location called "Robinson."

At MP 6.28, the same location as the culvert, a dam was constructed which abutted the RV’s high embankment. The railroad’s embankment formed a levee. The dam was built across the stream by Rev. Conrad Schotthoefer to provide an ice skating pond near the St. Teresa’s Ball Park. A storm, in August 1915, caused the dam to burst and the flood of water washed out a seventy-five foot long section of the embankment. No information has presented itself to say the dam was ever rebuilt. Remains of the dam still exist as of 2025.

There was a stone loading platform constructed over the two lower quarry sidings on the eastern side of Shunpike Road. It was a simple platform supported by two concrete abutments. The quarry had a narrow gauge railroad (either 18" or 24" gauge) to move 5-ton loaded stone carts from the stone crusher to the loading platform, a distance of a few hundred feet. Once there, the carts would be dumped into standard gauge gondola cars or motor trucks. These carts were moved manually by laborers. In about 1917, the quarry acquired two 3-ton Plymouth locomotives to move these carts, which were enlarged to accommodate 7-tons of stone. A portion of one of the concrete abutments still exists in 2025.

Commonwealth Quarry Co. (1902-1921)
North Jersey Quarry Co. / North Jersey Amesite Co. (1921-1956)
Houdaille Industries, Inc. (1956-1957)
Houdaille Construction Materials, Inc. (1957-1981)
Shunpike Road, Springfield. 

Stone quarry and construction materials; outbound stone, inbound cement. 

The “Summit Quarry” - actually located within the borders of Springfield - began operations in the nineteenth century. Allen G. Woodruff operated the quarry through December 1899. Lawrence C. Bonnell (1869-1952) and Amos A. Potter acquired the quarry property from E. P. Bassett in September 1900. Bonnell and Potter incorporated as the Commonwealth Quarry Co. in December 1902. In 1906, the Rahway Valley Railroad opened alongside the western side of the quarry. Louis Keller, the railroad’s principal owner, incorporated the Baltusrol Railroad in 1907 to construct a 1,400’ spur into the quarry. In 1918, the company built a new stone loader alongside the RV and installed a narrow gauge railroad to haul stone in 7-ton capacity carts from the quarry to the loaded, for dumping into full size gondola cars. The loader was also used to load motor trucks. The loader was a simple platform suspended from two concrete abutments. The dump cars were brought from the quarry onto the loading platform by one of the quarry’s two Plymouth locomotives. Frederick W. Schmidt (1866-1926) founded the North Jersey Quarry Co. in 1904 and succeeded in consolidating the various Northern New Jersey stone quarries owned by Bound Brook Crushed Stone Co., Morris County Crushed Stone Co., Hodgson Sand & Gravel Co., Consolidated Stone & Sand Co., and the Portland Sand & Gravel Co. The Commonwealth Quarry Co. was under Schmidt’s control by 1921. The Commonwealth quarry was used to supply aggregate for Schmidt’s North Jersey Amesite Co. subsidiary, which produced bituminous pavement. Irving W. Wortman (1885-1944) took over as chief executive of the company after Schmidt’s death in 1926. The quarry employed forty persons in 1938. The company discontinued shipping stone by rail in about 1940 or 1941, preferring to ship outbound loads all over the area by truck. As the construction of highways, roadways, and homes required bulk shipments of cement, North Jersey Quarry Co. had constructed a batch cement plant alongside the old quarry siding. Thereafter, the RV would bring in carloads of cement that came in from the cement belt region of Pennsylvania along the CNJ and L&NE railroads, from Dragon Cement in Siegfried, Pennsylvania, for example. The cars were normally two bay covered hoppers and always came in from the CNJ at Aldene. In this era, there was only one track into the quarry. A long siding curved into the quarry under a cement loader. Cars would come in about three times a week. Sometimes the quarry would get two or three cars at a time, other times it’d be just one car. On average, a Monday might see three cars and on a Wednesday or Thursday two more cars might come in. The quarry was good for an average of about a car a day. The carloads of cement were heavy and the 70-tonners couldn’t handle two or three cars plus whatever other cars there were for Summit, when coming westbound. Oftentimes, the crew would double the hill and leave their train at Springfield or Baltusrol to run up the cement cars by themselves. On at least one occasion, the quarry got five carloads in. George Davis and a section man came out with the second 70-tonner to give the train a shove up the hill. In March 1956, Houdaille Industries, Inc. of Buffalo, New York acquired North Jersey Quarry Co. for $5.6 million. A year later, the company spun off a new subsidiary - Houdaille Construction Materials, Inc. (HCMI) - to operate its quarry properties from a centralized office in Morristown, New Jersey. Houdaille continued to bring in carloads of cement after taking over the property. However, the company switched to trucks for this purpose in Summer 1966. Houdaille’s operations at the quarry concluded in 1981. The property is now owned by Union County.