Phillipsburg Railroad Historians Homepage

The Phillipsburg Railroad Historians, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, run a railroad museum in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, a Delaware River town still threaded by former Lehigh Valley Railroad trackage and the route of the old Belvidere-Delaware branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The group is best known as keeper of the Centerville & Southwestern, the beloved 9 7/16-inch gauge miniature railroad that dairy farmer Eugene Becker began building on his Roseland, New Jersey farm in 1938 and opened to revenue riders a decade later. After Interstate 280 took part of its route and a 1972 tax reassessment doomed the farm, the C&S made its final run that Labor Day; the dismantled railroad passed through Middletown Township before landing in Phillipsburg, where ambitions to anchor a New Jersey State Railroad and Transportation Museum faded when the needed 35-acre parcel went to development. The Historians revived a truncated stretch of the line, and after decades of split storage the last of the C&S rolling stock is set to move into a new secure building beside the group's carshop.