The area originally known as Wissahickon Heights, later St. Martin’s, and now Chestnut Hill West, was nurtured by the efforts of financier Henry H. Houston and his son-in-law George Woodward. Houston began working for the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1851 and served as director from 1881 to 1895. He invested in land along the Wissahickon Creek, and in 1884, at his urging, the Pennsy opened a subsidiary line called the Philadelphia, Germantown & Chestnut Hill Railroad. Houston saw to it that Chestnut Hill, like Bryn Mawr, acquired an elegant resort hotel, built by the architectural firm William D. Hewitt and George W. Hewitt, who had once been a partner of Frank Furness. It was called the Wissahickon Inn and is now part of Chestnut Hill Academy. Houston built his own mansion on a bluff overlooking the Wissahickon Creek about three blocks from St. Martin’s railroad station.
Port Richmond
The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was responsible for the development of a different kind of suburb in that part of the city, which was officially created by the 1847 Act to Incorporate the District of Richmond in the County of Philadelphia. A few years earlier, the railroad had constructed its main coal terminal on the waterfront in this area, which took its name from Richmond Hall, the estate of its original settler, William Ball, who was related to George Washington.
At Port Richmond, workers guided the railroad’s coal cars along tracks on piers extending out into the Delaware River, where their contents were loaded into waiting ships. Over the years, more sophisticated mechanized car dumpers were installed, and the Port Richmond complex grew into one of the busiest commercial ports on the Atlantic coast.
The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company created a neighborhood when it opened its shipping and receiving terminal at Port Richmond. This drawing from the Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania shows the area circa 1852.
Since the laborers needed convenient dwellings, developers constructed blocks of cheap row houses in this area between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Originally an Irish working-class neighborhood, it acquired its share of Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians when the railroad began recruiting more recent immigrants to replace striking workers.
A railroad viaduct over Richmond Avenue just below Somerset Avenue, now dwarfed by the elevated I-95 highway, once carried coal cars to the piers. The piers are still there, some overgrown with vegetation, others still in use by other businesses now served by Conrail. Public access is denied. The adjacent old residential neighborhood of row houses and narrow streets, however, now often clogged with double-parked vehicles, remains neat and appealing. And thanks to the ethnic mix of its residents, it has interesting small ethnic businesses such as Czerw’s, makers of Polish kielbasa.
Bridge History on the Schuylkill
Pennsylvania’s many rivers and streams meant that the Commonwealth would need a lot of bridges, regardless of the form of transportation its citizens preferred. The railroad industry challenged American bridge engineers with much heavier vehicles than had ever moved over bridges before, causing the science of bridge building to evolve hand in hand with the development of locomotives.
The earliest railroad bridges tended to be the same masonry arch bridges in use for centuries, which were sturdy, but costly and time-consuming to build. Nineteenthcentury engineers experimented with other time-honored forms, such as timber truss bridges (which were sometimes covered) and suspension bridges, but these turned out to be ill suited for railroads. Many railroads built bridges of metal trusses, first iron and later steel, the very first being for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad in 1845. The late nineteenth century saw a revival of the arched railroad viaduct, constructed of masonry, concrete, or a combination of both materials.
The stone arch Falls Bridge, built by the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad over the Schuylkill in 1855, was meant to carry coal cars to Port Richmond. It is the third bridge at this location of the Falls of the Schuylkill River, which was by then a thriving industrial community. The bridge crosses the river diagonally, with its piers parallel to the flow of water.
The Pennsylvania Railroad gave the city something more dramatic: a reinforced concrete viaduct with dramatically tall arches that crosses over the Schuylkill River and the Schuylkill Expressway near Manayunk, completed in 1918. In recent years, it has been called the Pencoyd Viaduct, but most people know it simply as the Schuylkill River Railroad Bridge. When the Schuylkill Expressway was built to fit beneath it, the gentle S-curve and the arches of this bridge became a familiar sight for millions of commuters. An article by Malcolm L. Bruno and Patrick E. Purcell about the PRR’s Schuylkill Division describes the bridge as “leaping over the Reading freight line, the four-lane Schuylkill Expressway, the Schuylkill River, various side streets of Manayunk and the Reading passenger line.” SEPTA ran trains into Manayunk over this viaduct until 1990. More recently, Lower Merion Township designed a new rail-trail called the Cynwyd Heritage Trail, which runs from the Cynwyd Station to this viaduct, where a bike and pedestrian trail over the bridge will join the Ivy Ridge Trail of Philadelphia.
The stone arch Falls Bridge as depicted in Philadelphia and Its Environs.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s “arch bridge” spans the Schuylkill River, the Schuylkill Expressway, and the old Schuylkill Canal in Manayunk.
Marvels Below Ground
By the 1860s, the need for longer, deeper railroad tunnels spurred the development of new tunneling equipment such as nitroglycerin, dynamite, and compressed-air drills. Two tunnels in the Philadelphia area were constructed using the more tedious, older method of drilling holes in solid rock with hammer and chisel, then blasting out a section with black powder and removing the debris with wagons and carts.
The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad built the Black Rock Tunnel beneath Phoenixville between 1835 and 1837 under the supervision of W. Hasell Wilson. More than nineteen hundred feet long, it was the second railway tunnel to be built in the United States, with the first having been constructed in western Pennsylvania for the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Opened for service in 1838, it is the nation’s oldest railroad tunnel still in use.
In 1835, Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania reprinted a private letter signed only with “W” (perhaps by Wilson, the engineer) that describes the route of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad through Phoenixville while it was still under construction: “In traveling over the road when finished, the passengers will pass over the [Schuylkill] river at a considerable height—from off a stupendous stone bridge, and immediately enter an extensive tunnel. The top of the tunnel will be 122 feet below the surface of the ground, and the grade of the road 17 feet below, making it 139 feet from the grade of the road, to the surface of the ground.”
In a travel book from the 1850s, Eli Bowen refers to Black Rock Tunnel as “one of the heaviest sections of railroading ever executed in the United States.” A history of southeastern Pennsylvania written nearly a century later by J. Bennett Nolan mentions speculation surrounding the costly nature of this engineering feature: “It was said this was done because numerous influential stockholders lived in that region and it was desired to gain the freight business of Phoenixville’s iron industries.”
Yet despite being so historic a structure, the tunnel gets no tourists. The curving tracks hide the tunnel from view on the south side, and there is no decent vantage point from which to view the portal on the north side. Railroad fans are discouraged from walking along the tracks for safety reasons. Both the tunnel and the line are now owned by Norfolk Southern.
The Flat Rock Tunnel, on the other hand, is seen by thousands every day, as it is wedged beside the eastbound lanes of the Schuylkill Expressway precisely where commuter traffic is often slowed during the morning rush hour. Flat Rock was the original name of the area that became the industrial village of Manayunk. There is still a Flat Rock Dam in the Schuylkill and a Flat Rock Road in Manayunk. The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad began work on Flat Rock Tunnel in 1836, and the tunnel was open for service by 1840. It was less than
half the length of Black Rock Tunnel and cost less to build.
The Black Rock Tunnel was built between 1835 and 1837. This view is from the 1852 Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia’s Commuter Rail Tunnel
On November 12, 1984, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), which currently operates the region’s commuter trains, finally accomplished something the Penn Central said could not be done and something the Pennsylvania Railroad never would have done: SEPTA opened a commuter rail tunnel linking the downtown stations of the former Pennsy and Reading Railroads.
SEPTA grew out of SEPACT (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Compact), a federally assisted commuter rail demonstration project created in 1961 to prevent commuter rail service from being abandoned in the Philadelphia area. At that time, both the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the Reading Company had been trying to offset increasing deficits by cutting commuter service and raising the fares. According to a 1969 report issued by SEPTA, SEPACT was formed to “demonstrate the effectiveness of improved service and reduced fares” and to initiate more regional cooperation between the city and its suburbs.
SEPTA succeeded in keeping the trains running in Philadelphia, and so far the tunnel has been its crowning achievement. It took six years and $330 million to build the 1.7-mile tunnel that connected historically separate rail systems to create “the first totally unified regional rail system in North America,” according to SEPTA’s train operations director, who was quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer on its opening day. The tunnel meant that passengers could ride between any of SEPTA’s 167 train stations. It also deposited passengers beneath an urban mall, which has subsequently sparked a great deal of development in that area of Center City Philadelphia.
The completion of the tunnel triumphed over more than a quarter century of carping and nay-saying. Originally proposed during the 1950s, the tunnel concept first faced an incredulous “Who needs it?” attitude. In their book about the Penn Central, Daughen and Binzen quote a Penn Central executive: “If you get the money and build the center city tunnel you’re not going to have anything to operate on it. I said eighty percent or more of this equipment can’t operate in that tunnel. Because it will have over a two percent grade and they won’t go up the hill. Empty.”
Luckily, the tunnel idea won a powerful champion in Philadelphia’s colorful mayor Frank Rizzo, who made it a priority and got it under construction. Commuters traveling between Suburban Station and Market Street East now take one of the most useful additions to Philadelphia’s modern railroad landscape for granted.
The New Hope & Ivyland Railroad
Despite the noisy traffic on nearby Street Road, the tiny Lahaska station on the New Hope & Ivyland Railroad (NH&I) retains the feel of a rural whistle-stop station, where passengers waited a century ago for the milk train to arrive. A suitably plaintive whistle can be heard while the train is still miles away. Then a cloud of steam precedes the 1925 Baldwin locomotive known as “Old Number Forty” as it rounds a distant curve and finally comes into view.
The NH&I got its start as the Northeast Pennsylvania Railroad. Its trains began running between New Hope and Philadelphia in 1891. Later incorporated into the Reading system, the NH&I became a classic milk route, providing freight and passenger service to residents of a rural area, many of whom were dairy farmers.
The NH&I was saved from abandonment in the late 1960s by a group of Philadelphians who continued to provide freight and passenger service, but in 1970, it filed for reorganization under the Bankruptcy Act just two weeks before the Penn Central did. It shared the Penn Central’s problems of high operating costs and low returns, but unlike the Penn Central, it was seeking to increase its passenger service and make the transition to a tourist railroad. An article in the July 25, 1970, issue of Business Week notes that traffic had increased 15 percent since the tourist runs were started in 1966.
Today most riders of this railroad get on at the popular tourist destination of New Hope and simply make a trip to Lahaska and back, which takes about an hour, including the time required to switch Number Forty from one end of the train to the other. On the trip, families and rail fans will ride through the Aquetong Forest, where they’ll see fewer glimpses of dairy farms than of the country mansions of wealthy Bucks County residents. The NH&I also passes a number of sites that are not so much scenic as they are landmarks of film culture. The train crosses “Pauline’s Trestle,” the spot where actress Pearl White, star of the silent series The Perils of Pauline, was tied by the villain to the railroad tracks to wriggle and writhe until she was rescued from an oncoming locomotive by her hero. The train also passes the sawmill where another movie had Pauline strapped to a conveyor belt but saved from a buzz saw in the nick of time.
In the height of the summer tourist season, the NH&I makes seven runs per day. It also features special entertainment trips, such as a murder mystery train, in cooperation with Act 1 Productions. There are also dinner trains featuring meals in its dining car with onboard bar. Not many tourists realize that this same railroad hauls freight, connecting its customers to CSX lines. In 2011, NH&I formed a wholly owned subsidiary called Pennsylvania Northeastern Railroad to take on CSX freight operations on SEPTA-owned lines in the vicinity of Lansdale.
The West Chester Railroad
In December 1996, SEPTA leased an unused portion of the former Pennsylvania Railroad branch to the borough of West Chester so that a new West Chester Railroad could begin to operate its tourist trains in the seven miles between the borough and an old station at Glen Mills. The newsletter of the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society announced that this promising venture had purchased locomotives and passenger cars and had begun bringing the old tracks up to par for trains that would be operating at fifteen miles per hour.
The tourist trains now follow not the route of the original West Chester Railroad, which connected to the State Works at Malvern, but rather the direct route that replaced it in 1858. A railroad maintenance and operations company called 4 States Railway Services Inc. owns and maintains the railroad equipment, while the West Chester Railroad Heritage Association operates the tours. Passengers ride a little over seven miles past old stations at Westtown, Cheyney, and Locksley before arriving at the Victorian train station at Glen Mills, which is believed to have been designed by Frank Furness and now functions as a museum for the local historical society. Rides begin in the spring with the Easter Bunny Express, followed by catered picnic and barbecue specials during the summer, Fall Foliage Tours, and the Santa Express.
The West Chester Railroad prepares for an excursion.
Several years ago, my husband and I took a Great Train Robbery ride, during which our train was taken over by the River Rat Gang after they overcame federal marshals who had come aboard to escort the gang’s leader to jail and guard a shipment of gold headed for the mint in Philadelphia. After two shootouts, and with local law enforcement forces sent in to our rescue, the bad guys were vanquished and one marshal strolled the passenger cars to reassure us all and hand out spent cartridges to the kiddies.
There has been talk over the years about reestablishing commuter service with Philadelphia, but this would require expensive upgrades to the tracks. The railroad’s managers would like to offer local industries freight service between West Chester and other railroads outside the county, but they would have to make the winning bid on a contract offered by SEPTA. In the meantime, you can charter an entire train for corporate or group events, or rent the railroad’s dining car on a regularly scheduled train for your personal party.
Train Spotting at Valley Forge
When Valley Forge National Historical Park restored the old Valley Forge train station in 2009, it intended the station to serve as an information and orientation center for visitors to the small stone house that had served as Washington’s headquarters during the winter encampment of 1777–78. At the station, they would be greeted by a park ran
ger and view exhibits that would give them a better understanding of Washington and the significance of Valley Forge in the American Revolution. The restoration was also intended to preserve the old Philadelphia & Reading station, constructed in 1911 in a Beaux Arts style using the same type of stone as Washington’s Headquarters. Rail fans will enjoy viewing its original interior architectural ornamentation, which also imitates that of Washington’s Headquarters, and its restored baggage area and stationmaster’s office.
The National Park Service may not have realized it, but it was also giving Philadelphia-area rail fans a great train-spotting location for Norfolk Southern freight trains moving along that railroad’s Harrisburg line. The station’s outdoor passenger platform canopy has been restored and furnished with comfortable benches. When we arrived one chilly morning in March, a rail fan was setting up his equipment. He had no idea what the train schedule was; he simply intended to spend the day photographing any trains that passed through. The parking area for those visiting Washington’s Headquarters has now been moved to a hill overlooking the stone house and train station, which one reaches via a winding path with stairs, providing other prime locations from which photographers can take train photos from above.
Whether Valley Forge National Historical Park intended it, its renovated Valley Forge train station provided the region with a great train-spotting location.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 6