So the West Shore tracks, adapted for high-class, high-speed through electric service from Utica to Syracuse, represented a happy thought. Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains leaving each terminal hourly, making but a few stops and the run of over forty-four miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points the movement of the New York Central's overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock. Similarly the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system, running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street-railroad system, though reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system and now operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch. Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent again its branches to outside companies--and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines in the metropolitan district around New York and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction--but ten years ago it changed the suburban service lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric. More recently it has tried a third method--by organizing an entirely separate trolley company to build an overhead trolley road paralleling its main line from Waverly, New York, to Corning, New York. In some stretches this new trolley road is built on the right of way of the Erie's main line.