Ontario & Western Railway Museum

The Roscoe O&W Railway Museum preserves the story of the New York, Ontario and Western Railway, the fabled 'O&W' that once served this Sullivan County hamlet. The railroad began life in 1868 as the New York and Oswego Midland, organized by DeWitt C. Littlejohn to connect the docks opposite New York City with the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, and re-emerged as the O&W in 1880 with a mainline from Weehawken, New Jersey, to Oswego and branches reaching Kingston, Utica, and the anthracite fields around Scranton after 1890. Catskill resort travel and Pennsylvania coal sustained it for decades, but better highways and the fading coal trade drained its revenues, and the railroad's very last passenger train departed from Roscoe itself, bound for Weehawken, on September 10, 1953. When the final freight rolled from Norwich to Middletown on March 29, 1957, the O&W earned a melancholy distinction: the first Class I railroad in the United States ordered liquidated and abandoned in its entirety. The museum in Roscoe — 'Trout Town, USA' — now keeps that memory alive and is counted among the village's notable attractions.