Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  Conrail made the news again a decade later, in 1997, when two other railroads, Norfolk Southern Corporation and CSX Corporation, filed a joint application to assume and split Conrail’s routes and assets. With the approval of the Surface Transportation Board in 1998, Norfolk Southern Corporation acquired 58 percent of Conrail, with the other 42 percent going to CSX Corporation. It may sound simple, but it took years for the two railroads to solve logistical problems and integrate the Conrail segments into their own systems. To do so, they had to establish new traffic patterns and negotiate new labor contracts.

  There were areas where the two railroads would share assets, including the Philadelphia and Detroit regions and parts of northern and southern New Jersey. Though Conrail ceased to exist, CSX and Norfolk Southern maintained it as an entity to act as their terminal and switching agent in these areas. Today Philadelphia still has a Conrail headquarters. In Pennsylvania, Conrail serves customers in the city of Philadelphia and along the Delaware River in Chester and Bucks Counties.

  Whither Amtrak?

  In 1925, William Wallace Atterbury, then the new president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was quoted in the company’s house organ as saying, “I have never believed that the public could run the railroad business. Indeed I have never believed that legislatures or railroad commissions could run the railroad business.” Nearly half a century later, in 1971, the government was prepared to try by creating the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, with a national intercity passenger service marketed under the name Amtrak. Existing railroads were able to pay the federal government to assume their passenger operations; the government ended up with more than twenty thousand miles of routes, most of them running over some other railroad’s tracks.

  By 2001, Amtrak was operating in forty-five states and serving more than twenty-three million passengers per year, with 260 trains reaching 512 stations. Over the years, it had begun adding freight cars to some of its trains to increase revenues. Hopes were high for the long-awaited Acela Express high-speed service.

  However, Amtrak has never in its history come close to making a profit. In 2001, Amtrak was $3 billion in debt and had to seek permission from the secretary of transportation to apply for a $300 million mortgage on New York City’s Pennsylvania Station to offset a shortfall in operating funds. In July 2002, it came within days of shutting down before another congressional agreement kept it rolling.

  In 1997, a book titled Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do about America’s Passenger Trains, Joseph Vranich, who had worked to create Amtrak, called for its demise. In his opinion, its major problem is that it is a “government-created, government-protected, and government-guided legal monopoly” that is unprogressive, while at the same time remaining protected from competition. In 2001, Sen. John McCain called for a national debate over what to do with Amtrak.

  Two years later, while Amtrak’s president, David L. Gunn, argued for greater federal outlays to improve service and Amtrak’s physical plant, the Bush administration proposed breaking up the system and shifting responsibility for intercity passenger rail to the states. In 2005, the administration went farther by proposing a federal budget with zero funding for Amtrak. Later that year, the Amtrak board, dominated by Bush appointees, proposed setting up a new subsidiary to manage Amtrak’s northeast corridor, and then fired Gunn.

  However, Amtrak had bipartisan support in Congress, which approved it budget, enabling the railroad to keep running its trains and making infrastructure repairs. Amtrak recorded its highest-ever ridership in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010. The creation of National Train Day, celebrated since 2008, seems to have been an attempt by Amtrak to keep public support on its side. In 2010, the event drew thousands to Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station as well as other metropolitan stations, with exhibits, performances, and a chance to view historical as well as state-of-the-art equipment.

  Christopher Morley Travels

  Christopher Morley was a well-known author whose sketches for Philadelphia’s Public Ledger were collected in a book titled Travels in Philadelphia, published circa 1920. In a sketch called “The Paoli Local,” he wrote:

  The first surprise the Paoli Local gives one never fails to cause a mild wonder. Just after leaving West Philadelphia Station you see William Penn looming away on the right. As you are convinced that you left him straight behind, and have not noticed any curve, the sensation is odd….

  At Overbrook one gets one’s first glimpse of those highly civilized suburbs. It is a gloriously sunny May afternoon. Three girls are sitting under a hedge at the top of the embankment reading a magazine. The little iron fences, so characteristic of the Main Line, make their appearance….

  Toward Merion we skirt a brightly sliding little brook under willow trees, with glimpses of daintily supervised wilderness. It is all so trimly artificed that one is surprised to see that the rubbery stalks of the dandelion have evaded the lawn-mower just as they do in less carefully razored suburbs. Honeysuckles sprawl along the embankments, privet hedges bound neat gardens. There is a new station at Merion. In old bucolic days the Main Line station masters lived and kept house in the depots, and if one had to wait for a train one could make friends with the station master’s little girl and pet cat. But all those little girls are grown up now and are Bryn Mawr alumnae….

  And there is one thing that they can never change: the smell of the Haverford lawns in May, when the grass is being mowed. A dazzling pervasion of sunlight loiters over those gentle slopes, draws up the breath of the grass, blue space is rich with its balmy savor…. And here comes Henry Carter careering over the lawns with his gasoline mowing machine. Everything is the same at heart. And that is why it’s the perfect pilgrimage, the loveliest spot on earth, then, now, and forever.

  Local Chapters of the National Railway Historical Society

  In an article about the formation of the National Railway Historical Society printed in its journal, National Railway Bulletin, longtime Philadelphia-area railroad historian Francis G. Tatnall writes that in 1935, officers of the Lancaster Railway & Locomotive Historical Society and the Interstate Trolley Club of Trenton decided to consolidate their clubs and create a larger organization that could operate through local chapters to “preserve steam and electric railway historical material; to encourage the building of model railways; to secure data on the history of transportation; and to encourage rail transportation.” It was one of a number of organizations created and initiatives undertaken to preserve and celebrate railroad heritage while the Depression was taking its toll on the industry.

  National chapters were added in 1936 and through the course of the Second World War. By 2010, the National Railway Historical Society had 177 chapters and about eighteen thousand members. Although the society remains headquartered in Philadelphia, its extensive library is currently housed off-site in retrievable storage in Three Rivers, Massachusetts. The library contains, among other materials, more than four thousand books on North American railways; sets of periodicals, including chapter newsletters; and films, videos, and slides. Research requests can be submitted electronically via the society’s website. In the summer of 2010, the society launched an official Facebook page.

  Local chapters define their own goals and organize their own activities, which may include preservation efforts such as local rail museums or the operation of railroad equipment or rolling stock. The Philadelphia Chapter, which celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2011, hosts monthly dinner meetings with educational entertainment such as lectures and slide shows by chapter members or invited guests. It also holds an annual auction of railroadiana and publishes a newsletter called Cinders. The Lehigh Valley Chapter meets monthly at what was once the main office of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company. It hosts regular programs, an annual banquet, picnics at train-spotting sites, and at least one field trip per year. In 2010, the Delaware Valley Chapter celebrated its fortieth anniversary, an event attended by some of the chapter’s founding members.r />
  The Region’s Railroad Giants

  Thomas A. Scott (1823–81)

  Thomas A. Scott obtained his education on the job, clerking for several stores and other employers, including the toll collector on the turnpike between Philadelphia and Columbia. In 1850, he joined the Pennsylvania Railroad as its agent at Duncansville (near Hollidaysburg), where a new portion of railroad joined the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Here he supervised the transfer of freight between the two systems.

  Thomas A. Scott. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Within ten years, Scott was promoted to general superintendent and then vice president. An article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography by James A. Ward describes the celebrated “symbiotic partnership” between Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thomson during the Pennsy’s greatest period of expansion. Scott is generally acknowledged to have balanced Thomson’s technical know-how with a sense of daring, a charismatic personality, and a great deal of political savvy. The partnership lasted until a falling-out that occurred around 1873, not long before Thomson’s death.

  When the Civil War started, Scott went to work for the governor of Pennsylvania, using the railroads to deliver equipment and state troops where they were needed. In 1861, he took control of the Union’s railroads and telegraph lines and became assistant secretary of war. Scott was elected president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1874 after Thomson died. He resigned in 1880 because of failing health.

  Alexander J. Cassatt (1839–1906)

  The son of a Pittsburgh banker, Alexander J. Cassatt moved with his family to Philadelphia and then Paris. After attending private schools abroad, he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1859 with a degree in civil engineering. Two years later, Cassatt joined the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he worked his way up through a number of engineering jobs before being named superintendent of motive power in Altoona. He advocated a number of technological improvements, such as the use of standard designs for locomotives and the adoption of air brakes.

  Cassatt resigned from the Pennsy in 1882 but remained active in the railroad industry, forming what was popularly known as the “Cassatt Line South,” or the New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad. This daring business venture built a railroad straight down the length of the Delmarva Peninsula, where fast-moving barges took railroad cars across the choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk and direct rail connections to the South. By 1885, this line was in full operation, making it possible to bring southern produce to northeastern markets more quickly and in fresher condition than ever before.

  Cassatt devoted much of his retirement time to his Chester County farm, Chesterbrook, where he raised prize racehorses and sheep, pigs, and cattle. He rode to hounds with the Radnor Hunt and was one of the nation’s earliest collectors of impressionist paintings.

  Alexander J. Cassatt returned to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1899 as president. One of his first accomplishments was the standardization of freight shipping rates and the elimination of the secret rebates that large shippers had always demanded. Under his administration, the Pennsy spent millions to rebuild major components of the railroad.

  The greatest monument to Cassatt’s presidency should still be standing in New York City, but it has vanished. Built by the influential architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the magnificent Pennsylvania Station, with its pink granite walls and its main waiting room modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla, was demolished in 1964, just over half a century after it was erected. It was replaced by an underground facility that sits beneath Madison Square Garden.

  Cassatt placed another feature on the Pennsy line between New York and Philadelphia, one still in use and familiar to millions of today’s Amtrak riders: twin tunnels constructed beneath the Hudson River, which make it possible for passengers and their baggage to be carried directly into Manhattan without having to transfer to a ferry for a time-consuming and often tedious ride.

  William Wallace Atterbury (1866–1935)

  After graduating from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1886, William Wallace Atterbury joined the engineering department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He held various engineering positions and assisted in making standard locomotive designs a reality. Starting in 1902, he occupied a number of executive positions in the railroad’s operations.

  When Gen. John Pershing asked for America’s best railroad man, Atterbury went to France in 1917 to take charge of the French railways needed to move American troops and supplies during the First World War. His service alerted him to the possibilities of commercial air travel and convinced him that the major railroads needed to become involved with this new opportunity.

  The administration of William Wallace Atterbury as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad lasted from 1925 to 1935, a decade of boom and bust for the entire American economy and a period of general decline for the railroad industry. In their 1949 history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, George H. Burgess and Miles C. Kennedy write, “The railroads had passed through trying times before, but never had they been faced by the combination of circumstances which now confronted them, and it is to the great credit of the Pennsylvania’s management under General Atterbury that the company was not only able to maintain its solvency and credit, but to go forward with great improvements even when conditions were at their worst.”

  Those improvements included electrification of the line between New York and Washington, D.C. Atterbury also carried out the construction of new passenger terminals in Philadelphia, including the city’s Thirtieth Street Station.

  Had he lived longer, Atterbury might have led the entire transportation industry in a bold new direction. The Pennsylvania Railroad invested in the development of a new company organized to provide coast-to-coast transportation in forty-eight hours or less, using planes in the daytime and trains at night. In a 1929 article published in the PRR house organ, Atterbury is quoted as saying, “I have no fear whatever for the railroads. They will share in the increased prosperity which the development of air transport will bring.”

  Asa Packer (1805–79)

  In his own day, the founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad was just as famous as Andrew Carnegie for personifying the nineteenthcentury ideal of the self-made man. Packer moved from his native Connecticut to Pennsylvania, where he found work as a carpenter’s apprentice, a canal boatman, and later a canal boat builder and merchant. In many published accounts of his career, various authors note that he made his original journey to Pennsylvania on foot with but a few coins in his purse and a knapsack on his back that contained all his worldly possessions.

  Asa Packer. ASA PACKER MANSION

  By the 1840s, he was already a wealthy man and one of the original incorporators of the Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill & Susquehanna Railroad, the initial attempt to supersede the canal being protected and defended by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. In 1851, Packer announced that he had purchased most of this railroad’s outstanding stock, essentially gambling his entire personal fortune on this venture. He hired Robert H. Sayre as his chief engineer and saw to it that the enterprise, which he renamed the Lehigh Valley Railroad, was successfully constructed and operating profitably to transport anthracite coal to markets in New York and Philadelphia.

  Although he served only briefly as president, Packer maintained a controlling stock interest in the Lehigh Valley Railroad throughout his life. In his history of this railroad, Robert Archer calls Packer the “undisputed ruler” of the Lehigh Valley Railroad during his lifetime.

  At his death in 1879, Packer was Pennsylvania’s richest man, with a personal fortune of around $17 million. After the early deaths of Packer’s two sons, his nephew Elisha P. Wilbur, who had initially been Packer’s private secretary and chief accountant for the company, became president.

  In his lifetime, Packer was also known as a generous philanthropist. Among the institutions that he founded are Lehigh University, which he modestly declined to name Packer University, and St. Luke’s Hosp
ital. Both institutions are currently thriving in the area south of Bethlehem known as Fountain Hill.

  Sampling the Region’s Railroad Scene

  The Pennsy in Downtown Philadelphia

  Early railroad managers found it convenient to have their trains stop near existing inns and taverns, where passengers could gather and wait. Soon railroads began building their own inns at regular stopping places, and eventually the concept of a railroad station emerged.

  The Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad’s first official station opened in 1850 and was located in Philadelphia at Eighth and Market Streets. The Pennsylvania Railroad opened its own downtown passenger and freight facilities and built a main depot at Thirtieth and Market Streets in 1864. Because America’s centennial celebration in 1876 was expected to bring thousands of visitors to a huge world’s fair in West Philadelphia, the Pennsy opened a new passenger station at Thirty-second and Market Streets. This Moorish-style building contained a restaurant, saloons, offices, baggage rooms, and waiting rooms. It remained standing until 1896, when it burned down.

  The old Broad Street Station, from the 1899 History of the Pennsylvania Railroad by William Bender Wilson.

  As the Pennsy grew in influence and economic importance, the railroad constructed its Broad Street Station in 1881, a Gothic Revival edifice that recalled a European cathedral in both style and scale. One of its less popular features was its “Chinese Wall,” a viaduct of brick arches that carried trains into town above street level. The Chinese Wall also divided the city with an unattractive structure that impeded traffic and took up valuable downtown space. The station was expanded with an adjacent building in 1893 but was ruined in 1923 by a devastating fire that burned for two days, despite the use of almost every piece of firefighting equipment in Philadelphia.