Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  Burgess and Kennedy described the original route of the eighty-two-mile-long Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. Its double tracks began at the corner of Broad and Vine Streets, ran north on Broad, and then traveled west to Twenty-first Street. After crossing a bridge over the Schuylkill, they mounted a steep hill with the help of an engineering feature called an inclined plane. Trains then chugged through the Chester Valley, stopping at Downingtown, Coatesville, and Lancaster, finally terminating at Columbia.

  One early improvement involved eliminating the inclined plane west of the Schuylkill, called the Belmont Plane after a colonial estate. The Pennsylvania Railroad built a new railroad track from what is today Ardmore to the Schuylkill River just south of Market Street, strengthened the Market Street Bridge, and connected the system to Philadelphia’s existing street railroad. According to the Burgess and Kennedy history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the old line, complete with its Belmont Plane, was sold to another railroad called the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company.

  The Pennsy’s original charter made provision for a single major branch line to be built from Pittsburgh to Erie and gave it permission to build smaller branches into any county through which the main line passed, but the Pennsy quickly skirted these restrictions and expanded by acquiring or leasing other railroad properties. As early as 1848, it had leased the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster Railroad, connecting its own terminus at Harrisburg with the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. In 1860, the Pennsy obtained interests in the Cumberland Valley Railroad and the Northern Central Railway, which gave Harrisburg connections with Hagerstown and Baltimore in Maryland and Sunbury in Pennsylvania.

  A Pennsylvania Railroad station that is no longer part of the Philadelphia landscape: the freight terminal at Thirteenth and Market Streets as it appeared in William Bender Wilson’s 1889 History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s bridge across the Schuylkill River as it appeared circa 1875 in Philadelphia and Its Environs.

  In order to achieve its principle goal of securing trade from the West, the Pennsy needed tracks that reached the growing cities west of Pittsburgh. It began to accomplish this by the end of the 1860s with its acquisition of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railway and the “Panhandle” lines to Chicago and St. Louis. It also needed to offer transportation to other East Coast cities in addition to Philadelphia. By the end of the 1870s, the Pennsy had leased or purchased sufficient other lines to run trains from New York Harbor at Jersey City to Baltimore and through Washington, D.C., to connections with railroads in Virginia. By the turn of the century, the Pennsy system included more than a hundred active companies.

  While the Pennsylvania Railroad was forging a corridor linking the four largest cities in the East, it made preparations for the demand for passenger operations. In 1870, the railroad contracted with the Pullman Palace Car Company for use of its equipment. In 1902, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s deluxe Pennsylvania Special, which would become famous later as the Broadway Limited, began taking passengers from New York to Chicago. The name, changed in 1912, honored the Pennsy’s four-and six-track main line, which the company had dubbed its “Broad Way of Commerce.” In later years, advertisements promoted the Broadway Limited as the fastest long-distance train in the world and the “Leader of the Fleet of Modernism,” often mentioning its “club-like” surroundings and onboard staff, which included a valet, barber, manicurist, and secretary.

  Only in a roundabout way can the Pennsy claim the first dining car: it acquired the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, which had placed a car fitted for food service on its regular trains during the Civil War. By the early 1900s, the Pennsy was famous for its diners, where professional waiters in starched white jackets served the railroad’s signature dishes, including meaty two-rib lamb chops and a creamy mayonnaise-based salad dressing. Each dining car had a steward hired for his extensive restaurant and hotel experience, who supervised the waiters and guaranteed overall customer satisfaction. An article published in 1926 in the railroad’s house organ, Pennsylvania Railroad Information, explains in detail the intricate and well-organized procedure for equipping the dining cars at the company’s commissary not only with food, but also with laundered table linens and cooking equipment that was carefully arranged in standard locations so that any chef could board any dining car and know where to find the spatula. “Pennsylvania Railroad dining cars are not dedicated to profit but to that intangible asset, goodwill,” the article proudly proclaims.

  By the time the Great Depression swept the United States, the PRR was the largest transportation system in the world, a corporation described by former president Samuel Rea in a pamphlet published in 1928 as “a self contained system traversing the great central belt of the country.” The Pennsy survived the 1930s without entering receivership or bankruptcy and even managed to continue to pay its stockholders dividends that decade, keeping its record of continuous payment unbroken.

  According to Burgess and Kennedy, in the PRR’s centennial year, 1946, the system encompassed 10,690 miles of lines stretching from Canada into the South and from the Mississippi River to the East Coast. At that time, it handled 9.38 percent of the nation’s freight traffic and 16.69 percent of its passenger traffic. However, the conclusion of their book included this ominous sentence: “Nonetheless, when normal times return [when World War II is well behind us] they [the PRR managers] will again face the competition of the truck, the bus, the airplane, and the private automobile.” The company recorded its first deficit that year.

  The Pennsy had been addressing the challenge of competition with its electrification program, which had been initiated prior to World War I. Some busy commuter lines out of Philadelphia were electrified to provide cleaner, faster service and eliminate the need to turn steam engines around at the Pennsy’s downtown passenger station. The line from New York to Washington, D.C., was electrified in 1935, as was the route between Philadelphia and Harrisburg in 1937–38.

  Following World War II, the Pennsy abandoned its investments in new steam-engine designs and expensive electrification in favor of equipping the road with diesel engines. It previously had been slow to consider this option, perhaps because of the threat to the coal industry, which constituted a significant portion of its freight business. But by then it was too late. Better automobiles and bigger trucks coupled with highway improvements provided more flexibility, and airplanes made long-distance travel a lot faster. America’s population began to gravitate away from the Northeast, which was generously supplied with railroads, to the Sun Belt. By the 1960s, railroads that handled a lot of passenger traffic, like the Pennsy, were losing money. By 1967, even the U.S. Postal Service had ceased to ship the nation’s mail by train.

  Railroad executives began to look for ways to offset their losses by the savings that could be realized through mergers. In the late 1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad began to put in motion the machinery for these two old rivals to merge. Following approval by the Supreme Court, the two lines joined to become the Penn Central Railroad on February 1, 1968, the largest railroad merger in the nation’s history.

  Although the railroads merged, they never functioned as a single corporate entity and continued to use separate signal and computer systems. The top managers never worked well together, and the workers continued to hold allegiance to, and follow the rules of, their former railroads. In 1969, the Penn Central Railroad somewhat successfully introduced its profitable but technically troubled high-speed Metroliner, which covered the 226 miles between New York City and Washington, D.C., in less than three hours and had well-appointed passenger cars, but most of the railroad’s other passenger trains continued to be old, filthy, and often late.

  The Penn Central’s losses totaled $56.3 million in 1969 and another $62.7 million in the first quarter of 1970 alone. In The Wreck of the Penn Central, Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen write, “On June 21, 1970, wi
th a sickening crash that frightened Wall Street, jarred both the United States economy and its government, and scared off foreign investors, the nation’s largest railroad went broke.” The book sums up the debacle: “The railroad went broke because of bad management, divided management, dishonest accounting, diversion of funds into unprofitable outside enterprises, nonfunctioning directors or a basic disinterest in running, or even an inability to run, a railroad…. In the end, possibly even in the beginning, there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it.”

  Since 1974, the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society has been collecting and preserving information about the Pennsylvania Railroad and its subsidiaries. Local chapters and national meetings allow interested participants to share information and organize programs and excursions. The society publishes a journal called The Keystone and an electronic newsletter. It owns the 1849 Pennsylvania Railroad station in Lewistown, which still serves Amtrak passengers. The station has been restored and work is under way to catalog and organize the thousands of PRR documents stored there.

  Now that four decades have passed since its demise, the history of the failed and short-lived Penn Central Railroad is being preserved by the Penn Central Historical Society, which maintains a Facebook page.

  The Lehigh Valley

  By the 1840s, a number of entrepreneurs were mining coal in the area surrounding the Lehigh Valley. That coal made its way through the valley to markets in New York and Philadelphia by canal. Despite complaints about the canal’s high rates and the familiar disadvantages of canal transportation—its lack of speed and cessation of operations when the temperature dropped below freezing—the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company maintained its monopoly on through transportation in the Lehigh Valley and delayed the building of major railroads in this area for about twenty years after they had been initially proposed.

  Inspired by the success of the fledgling Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, Edward R. Biddle joined with other Philadelphia businessmen to incorporate the Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill & Susquehanna Railroad in 1846. The project languished for want of funding until Asa Packer took it over, renaming the business the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

  Under Packer’s direction, construction began in 1853 on a track that would follow the course of the Lehigh River to Easton, linking the existing Beaver Meadow Railroad (a short-line coal hauler that the Lehigh Valley Railroad later acquired) with New York Harbor via the Central Railroad of New Jersey and with Philadelphia via Trenton on the Belvidere Delaware Railroad. By 1855, the Lehigh was open between Easton and Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), with passenger depots in Easton, Mauch Chunk, Allentown, and Bethlehem, where passengers waited in a house belonging to Asa Packer.

  In his history of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Robert F. Archer describes a hectic period of expansion during the 1860s. Packer and his associates connected their anthracite railroad to upstate New York and Lake Erie at Buffalo, making its original forty-six miles just one link in an extensive through route. In all its history, the Lehigh confined its operations to Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. It also remained first and foremost an anthracite railroad, where moving passengers always took second place to moving coal.

  The 1875 book Philadelphia and Its Environs included a drawing of the railroad station on the south side of the river in Bethlehem.

  Although the Lehigh Valley is not very far from Philadelphia, the connection of the Lehigh Valley Railroad with the city was always tenuous. The Camden & Amboy Railroad and Transportation Company had provided significant funding to the Lehigh in exchange for assurances that would protect its own interests in Philadelphia. Also, at the same time that the original route of the Lehigh Valley Railroad was under construction, the North Pennsylvania Railroad was laying tracks between Philadelphia and Bethlehem for a line that opened in 1857. Eventually these two railroads shared a passenger station, an alliance that continued after the North Pennsylvania came under control of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad in 1879.

  For a long time, the Lehigh Valley Railroad had its headquarters near Asa Packer’s mansion in Philadelphia, but following Packer’s death in 1879, a new headquarters building was constructed south of Bethlehem in a neighborhood where other officers of the railroad had chosen to reside. Just down the road from their homes was the company that would become Bethlehem Steel, which manufactured steel rails to support heavier trains and increased traffic, taking in raw materials and shipping finished steel by rail.

  In Urban Capitalists, Burton W. Folsom describes the debacle made of this railroad’s management by Packer’s descendants, primarily his nephew Elisha P. Wilbur, who was left in charge after the early deaths of Packer’s two sons. Wilbur attempted expansion but ran short of cash and leased the line to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which went into receivership in 1893. His failure to recognize the Federal Railway Union resulted in strikes. After financier J. P. Morgan gained control of the Lehigh Valley’s stock, Wilbur relinquished his presidency in 1897.

  In a 1927 book about anthracite railroads, Jules Irwin Bogen writes of the rehabilitation of the Lehigh’s physical plant that followed this change and the railroad’s new policy of “liberal, and perhaps unusual, expenditures on both roadbed and equipment, in order to adapt the property to the most economical operation.” The executive offices were moved to New York about this time, “representing the end of control by independent Philadelphia capital.”

  In 1896, the Lehigh Valley Railroad launched its own glamour train, the Black Diamond Express, on a daylight run from Buffalo to Jersey City, New Jersey. The Black Diamond had elegant dining cars, club cars, and observation cars, and it survived until 1959. Unfortunately, its route was slower than those of its two major competitors, and despite the promotion of its scenic nature, traveling between New York City and Buffalo by way of Bethlehem and the upper Susquehanna River valley cost passengers time.

  By the 1920s, the market for anthracite coal was shrinking, and during the 1930s, the Lehigh Valley Railroad began to divest itself of branches and scramble for general merchandise freight. The Lehigh tried to reinvent itself as an industrial carrier in the 1950s, with modernized freight cars, but it faced a new competitor: the New York State Thruway. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which had maintained a controlling interest in its stock since 1928, took full control of the Lehigh in 1962. The Lehigh Valley Railroad lived on as part of the Penn Central system and was incorporated into Conrail in 1976. Its history is now interpreted and preserved by the Lehigh Valley Railroad Historical Society in Shortsville, New York.

  The East Penn Railroad

  Pennsylvania has a great many short-line railroads; if the Commonwealth is not number one in the nation, it’s close. Many are Conrail spinoffs. When Conrail was being established, the United States Railway Association was directed to identify “light density lines,” which might be discontinued rather than becoming part of Conrail. Conrail tried to place these in the hands of local operators with good track records, an objective that the Class I railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern still continue to do when making leasing arrangements.

  Traditionally, Pennsylvania’s short lines could be classified as those that are small, independent, and have always been that way; smaller lines now owned by regional authorities; or truly regional lines that may be independent or owned by holding companies. The East Penn Railroad (ESPN) does not really fit into any of these categories, however. The East Penn is more a portfolio of unconnected short lines and rail-related businesses than a single short line. It has been nicknamed “Little Blue,” since it operates blue locomotives like those working for “Big Blue” Conrail. In late 2011, it operated over a hundred miles of track on ten separated lines located in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, with connections to Norfolk Southern, CSX, and Conrail. The East Penn Railroad is owned by Regional Rail LLC, which also owns the Middletown & New Jersey Railroad.

  The “Little Blue” empire owes its existence to John C. Nolan, who began acqu
iring Conrail castoffs in 1992 with his acquisition of the Bristol Industrial Terminal Railway, which originally had been owned by the Kaiser Corporation but operated by the Pennsy. In 1995, Nolan’s operations grew with the acquisition of former Reading lines: the railroad’s Perkiomen Branch, Colebrook Branch, and Kutztown Branch, collectively known as the Perkiomen Cluster, plus the Lancaster Northern. In 1996, Nolan acquired a tiny remnant of the Reading’s old Chester Valley Branch, which had largely succumbed to suburban development and highway construction, and the following year added ten miles of track called the Quakertown Line, once part of the Reading’s Bethlehem Branch between Philadelphia and Bethlehem.

  Some folks may remember the passenger tourist lines that briefly ran from Kutztown to Topton from 1996 to 2000, first as the railroad’s excursions subsidiary, then with two other operators. Santa has been arriving via diesel locomotive at the Quakertown train station via the East Penn since 1997.

  In 1997, Nolan’s railroads became the Penn Eastern Rail Lines, subsidiary of Emons Transportation Group, but Nolan got his lines back when the Genesee & Wyoming Inc. holding company took over Emons. Nolan continued his expansion program in 2004 with the Pennsy’s old Octoraro Line, which had been purchased by SEPTA mainly to preserve it for possible future passenger transportation, and in 2005 with the Reading’s former Wilmington & Northern Branch. In 2006, Nolan purchased the old Kennett Square freight station, which became headquarters for the railroad’s operations and maintenance.

  In 2007, Regional Rail LLC purchased Nolan’s operations and now runs them under the direction of president and CEO Robert C. Parker and vice president Alfred M. Sauer. In 2011, Regional Rail LLC leased the York Industrial Track, which runs from York to Stony Brook, from Norfolk Southern. It also announced an agreement to acquire the rail, transload, and trucking assets of the Tyburn Railroad Company of Morrisville. Sauer indicated in an e-mail that “It is very much [East Penn’s] intention to continue to significantly grow our existing businesses, and acquire additional rail lines, short-line railroad companies, and/or rail-related businesses.”