and consolidated the service within its other operating routes. Railroad officials said the primary reasons were the EL's early-1960s severing of the Boonton Branch near Paterson, New Jersey, and the grades over the Pocono Mountains. The busy Morristown Line is the only piece of multi-track railroad on the entire 900-mile Lackawanna system that has not been reduced to fewer tracks over the years. It was triple-tracked nearly a century prior, and remains so today. The Lackawanna Cut-Off was abandoned in 1979 and its rails were removed in 1984. The line between Slateford Junction and Scranton remained in legal limbo for nearly a decade, but was eventually purchased, with a single track left in place. The Lackawanna Cut-Off's right-of-way, on the other hand, was purchased by the state of New Jersey in 2001 from funds approved within a $40 million bond issue in 1989. (A court later set the final price at $21 million, paid to owners Jerry Turco of Kearny, New Jersey and Burton Goldmeier of Hopatcong, New Jersey.) NJ Transit has estimated that it would cost $551 million to restore service to Scranton over the Cut-Off: a price which includes the cost of new trainsets. A 7.3-mile section of the Cut-Off between Port Morris and Andover, New Jersey, which was under construction, was delayed until 2021 due to environmental issues on the Andover station site; the Cut-Off between Port Morris and Andover is slated to re-open for rail passenger service no earlier than 2025. Delaware and Hudson (later Canadian Pacific) In 1979, Conrail sold most of the DL&W in Pennsylvania, with the DL&W main line portion between Scranton and Binghamton (which includes the Nicholson Cutoff) bought by the Delaware and Hudson Railway. The D&H was purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1991. CPR continued to run this portion of the DL&W main line until 2014, when it sold it to the Norfolk Southern. New York, Susquehanna, and Western The Syracuse and Utica branches north of Binghamton were sold by Conrail to the Delaware Otsego Corp., which operates them as the northern division of the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway. Norfolk Southern In 1997, Conrail accepted an offer of purchase from CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway. On June 1, 1999, Norfolk Southern took over many of the Conrail lines in New Jersey, including most of the former DL&W. It also purchased the remnants of the former Bangor