In today’s high-tech world, farmers no longer have to physically transport livestock to stockyards for sale. While researching the first edition of this book, my husband and I ignored the signs warning against trespassers and wandered around the collapsing pens and stalls. We returned in 2011 to find a new complex of office buildings on the site. Thankfully the old Stockyard Inn was still there, and it had been given a glamorizing makeover. In its bar, we listened to cool jazz and drank beer while we viewed the old photographs on the walls that showed what the stockyard once looked like.
Those approaching Lancaster from the east on Route 30 can’t miss Dutch Wonderland’s fairy castle façade and monorail that extends out over the parking lot. The park also has a ride called the Wonderland Special, which employs a diminutive C. P. Huntington locomotive that looks like a steam engine but is not. At Dutch Wonderland, the Special goes through a simulated tunnel and across a covered bridge as it winds its way among the park’s other attractions. Gates descend at grade crossings to keep tourists out of the gauge. It’s a nice starter ride for kiddies unfamiliar with trains.
The Manheim Historical Society interprets the history of trolleys and trains in the town’s restored train station. Manheim was a stop on the old Reading & Columbia Railroad, and this particular station, completed in 1881, is thought to have been designed by Frank Furness at a time when the line had become part of the Reading system. Passenger service to Manheim ceased in 1950, and the station was abandoned in 1976. The society and concerned citizens acquired it and restored it with the help of grants and private donations. The society also owns an operable trolley restored by members that is sometimes available for tours and short rides.
The old train station in Lititz is now a visitors center.
Lititz Springs Park is in the heart of Lititz, and the creek that runs through it was once a watering place for town cattle. Eventually the place was spruced up and became a public park. The pool created by a spring was faced with stone, as was the channel through which its water flows away. Railroad and trolley connections made it possible for people to visit on day trips.
The day we visited in 2011, ducks were swimming in the little stone-lined canals when they weren’t being fed or chased around by children. The park’s little caboose museum was not open that day, but the adjacent train station, once a stop on the Reading & Columbia Railroad and now the town visitors center, was. As at the Christiana Freight Station, its platform was furnished with benches facing the tracks but separated from them by a chain-link fence. We went inside the station to inquire how often trains went by.
Twice a day, the volunteer told us. They make freight deliveries to local businesses from a Norfolk Southern connection. They also greatly foul up the town’s traffic, since they cross Broad Street, where drivers are not accustomed to stopping for trains. Back outside, we heard a distant diesel horn, so we waited about fifteen minutes, but the morning train, already late according to the visitors center volunteer, failed to arrive.
The Railroad House of Marietta
Before the Railroad House in Marietta became a railroad station, the little brick building was already a place to eat. Marietta got its start as two separate communities established side by side on the eastern shore of the Susquehanna in 1803 and 1804, named by their founders David Cook and James Anderson for their wives, Mary and Henrietta. The tavern that became the Railroad House is said to have been built between 1820 and 1823, a time when the now united town’s growth might have been spurred by operations on the Conewago Canal, linking York Haven and Columbia.
The Railroad House acquired its name during the time when Pennsy passengers boarded trains from it. In 1860, the Pennsylvania Railroad built a new station across the street; the Railroad House continued to function as a hotel until the 1930s, when passenger railroad business started dropping off nationwide. It then changed hands a number of times and housed various local businesses. Since 1989, it has been a popular restaurant and bed-and-breakfast.
Harrisburg’s Railroad Station
Which American railroad station first sold food to travelers? In his 1899 history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, William Bender Wilson speculates that the railroad station in Harrisburg was “the ancestor of all the railroad station restaurants in America.” The first station to be constructed in the Commonwealth’s capital was built by the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster Railroad in 1837 on the site of the present station. It was little more than a two-story house beside the tracks, with a bell mounted near its chimney that an attendant would ring when he heard the engine whistle of an approaching train. According to Wilson, a cake and pie stand on the outdoor platform was the very first attempt to satisfy hungry passengers waiting for their trains.
The first train station in Harrisburg, as pictured in History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
The Amtrak station in Harrisburg.
Harrisburg’s second station, built in 1857, was much larger and Italianate in style, with a dining saloon that could seat up to three hundred. The third and current station to occupy the same site was completed in 1887, a more modest brick structure now known as the Harrisburg Transportation Center. Some of the adjacent train sheds were preserved and are now examples of the trussed roof design pioneered by Albert Fink in 1854.
Thanks to the local chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, this station is equipped with an example of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG1 locomotives. In 1938, this particular GG1 pulled the first electric train to arrive at the Harrisburg station, making Number 4859 a tribute to the electrification of the Paoli-to-Harrisburg portion of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line. The historic locomotive was retired in 1979, acquired by the National Railway Historical society three years later, and restored in Strasburg. It is part of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania collection. Often obscured by the Amtrak passenger coaches parked beside it, the GG1 can be hard to find. The Harrisburg Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society also owns the wooden 1920 Pennsylvania Railroad caboose located near the GG1.
In 2010, the chapter opened to the public the PRR Harris Switch Tower located at Seventh and Walnut Streets in Harrisburg as the Harris Railroad Switch Tower Museum. The chapter had purchased this building when it was decommissioned in the early 1990s. Constructed in 1930, the building housed the equipment and personnel that controlled all trains moving through Harrisburg. During the 1930s and 1940s, more than a hundred passenger trains and twenty freight trains each day had to be directed over a maze of trackage north of the city.
To keep a train from accidentally being put on a collision course, the Harris Tower equipment had a safety device that automatically locked out bad choices of track. The term “interlocking” described this process and eventually became associated with the equipment as a whole, as well as the building that housed it. Although the levers of the tower’s interlocking machine and model board are now connected to a computer simulation system rather than actual railroad tracks, visitors can operate the equipment to route virtual trains appearing on circa-1940s PRR schedules to their correct destinations. The museum also houses other vintage equipment, including intercom boxes, a teletype machine, and a rotary telephone. Real passenger and freight trains still pass by the Harris Tower, and its windows provide rail fans with a safe train-spotting location in all kinds of weather.
Rockville Bridge and Other Greater Harrisburg Railroad Artifacts
About five miles north of Harrisburg, Amtrak trains still cross Rockville Bridge, completed in 1902 as part of Alexander J. Cassatt’s general improvement plan to increase the capacity of the Pennsylvania Railroad system. Like the train station in Harrisburg, it too is the third structure of its kind on the same general site, which was chosen because the river is shallow here, making construction relatively easy. Rockville Bridge, which is constructed of Pennsylvania sandstone and concrete, replaced an iron-truss double-track bridge built in 1877, which in turn replaced the initial single-track wooden bridge comp
leted in 1849. Rockville Bridge is 3,820 feet long, making it the longest stone-and-concrete arch railroad bridge in the world and the crowning achievement of William H. Brown, chief engineer of the PRR for thirty-six years. After it withstood the devastation of Hurricane Agnes in 1972, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and became a national historic civil engineering landmark in 1979. Those interested in train spotting might consider checking in at the Bridgeview Bed and Breakfast in Marysville on the Susquehanna’s western shore. Rail action over the Rockville Bridge can be viewed from three sides of the building.
Other railroad bridges and their remains are located in downtown Harrisburg. The city’s northernmost railroad bridge was built by the Cumberland Valley Railroad. The southernmost bridge was built in 1920 as part of the Reading system and is now used by Norfolk Southern. Next to it, several stone piers remain that were intended to support a bridge for the South Pennsylvania Railroad, but that line was never completed.
Just south of the Rockville Bridge on the Susquehanna’s western shore stands Enola Yard, which was constructed as a freight classification yard between 1903 and 1906. Enola was the name of the daughter of the farmer who sold this land to the Northern Central Railway back in the 1880s for a depot. For a while, Enola was the largest yard in the world. It had two turntables and could hold up to twelve thousand standing cars, but during World War II, many more than that passed through Enola Yard every day. Traffic declined in the late 1950s after the Pennsy opened Conway Yard outside of Pittsburgh, and Conrail downgraded Enola Yard. When Norfolk Southern took over, operations not only resumed but were expanded and automated. Drive north on Route 11/15 on the west shore of the Susquehanna and you will find any number of places where you can pull over and watch the freight action.
The bridge that originally took trains across the Susquehanna above Harrisburg as depicted in the 1852 Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad printed a catalog of summer excursions in 1903, it included a photo of the new bridge in Rockville.
The first PRR train to cross the Rockville Bridge. RAILROAD MUSEUM OF PENNSYLVANIA
A passing Amtrak train indicates the scale of the Rockville Bridge.
A B&B in Marysville is a pleasant place to observe traffic on the Rockville Bridge.
In 2001, the National Civil War Museum opened in Harrisburg’s Reservoir Park. Harrisburg is not particularly famous for its role in the Civil War, but the city was the location of Camp Curtin, an important training and receiving center for volunteers and recruits located at the junction of several railroads. Despite the importance attributed by military historians to the Union’s railroads in the Civil War, the museum places relatively little emphasis on railroads, although one artifact on display demonstrates how closely tied the lives and activities of all people of this era were to railroads. “Lee’s Last Battle Map” is actually a railroad map published by the Richmond & Danville Railroad that Lee had used after withdrawing from Petersburg in his attempt to join Gen. Joseph Johnston at Danville, Virginia.
Civil War buffs might also want to catch the annual Civil War Remembered Reenactment offered by the Middletown & Hummelstown Railroad, in which all the action takes place along the tracks or in the train. This railroad’s regular excursions are eleven-mile round-trip rides along the old Union Canal, with a dramatic moment coming as the train crosses a bridge spanning Swatara Creek. Passengers can board in Middletown at the freight station or at Indian Echo Caverns. Independent since 1976, this line was originally incorporated in 1888 and became part of the Reading system in 1890, in which capacity it served local industries for most of the twentieth century. The Middletown & Hummelstown Railroad employs diesel locomotives pulling commuter coaches that were used by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad from the 1920s to 1980s. It offers a number of other themed excursions, including the Easter Bunny Express, Pumpkin Patch trains, and Santa’s Surprise trains, as well as murder mystery trains.
The “Ma and Pa” and Muddy Creek Forks
If you’re interested in rebuilding a railroad, you might want to consider joining the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society, founded in 1986 to preserve the heritage of the old “Ma and Pa.” Its members started by acquiring the last surviving Ma and Pa eight-mile segment of track and right-of-way in Muddy Creek Valley in southern York County. Volunteers are currently laying ties and rails so that the full-size equipment they also have acquired can be run once they have it restored to operating condition. In the meantime, visitors ride motorcar trains on Sundays in the summer and fall.
Of equal interest is the society’s other responsibility, the little village of Muddy Creek Forks, whose vintage buildings are strung along the railroad tracks. Restoration of these buildings will give visitors an idea of what it was like to live in 1915 in an agricultural community that was dependent on a railroad.
On days when the site is open to the public, visitors can step inside the general store, which also served as the Muddy Creek Forks railroad station. It was also the local post office, where mail was picked up and delivered by train. At the Muddy Creek Forks roller mill, visitors can learn how farmers delivered grain, which was processed, bagged, and stored until it could be delivered to grain dealers in Baltimore via boxcar. Visitors can see the stone foundations of a cannery where canned corn was loaded into freight cars on a railroad siding called Canning House Spur.
The locomotives and rolling stock of the speeder train at Muddy Creek Forks.
Buildings in the preserved village at Muddy Creek Forks.
The society publishes a quarterly newsletter called the York Mail. It is also completing a library of documents and photographs on the railroad and the other communities it served.
The Historic Gettysburg Train Station
In December 1858, the town of Gettysburg witnessed one of the largest celebrations in its history when some eight thousand residents and visitors gathered to watch the first train roll up to its new train station. Gettysburg, which had long been the crossroads of several important roads, might have had rail service sooner, but an effort begun in 1835 to connect Wrightsville with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad line via Gettysburg was abandoned for lack of financial support. In 1850, several Gettysburg businessmen formed the Gettysburg Railroad Company, which was officially chartered in 1851. They built an engine house, turntable, and freight station on the north side of the railroad tracks and located their passenger station conveniently near what was then the McClellan House, now Best Western’s Gettysburg Hotel. Like the 1857 station in Harrisburg, the Gettysburg train station was Italianate in style, with a cupola for its bell.
No one realized that within a few short years, Gettysburg’s railroad capabilities would be severely tested in the wake of the Civil War battle. Commercial warehouses located along the train tracks became the first field hospitals, while army surgeons also commandeered the train station ticket office and passenger platform. In July 1863, countless people visited the Gettysburg train station, including wounded soldiers heading for other hospitals or home and civilians coming to learn the fate of loved ones or claim their remains.
The Gettysburg train station is also where Abraham Lincoln first alighted when he arrived to deliver the Gettysburg Address. In the nearby town square of modern Gettysburg, a statue of Lincoln points toward the window of the room where he stayed. Many other American presidents and dignitaries followed Lincoln to Gettysburg, arriving at its train station when they came to the town for various commemorative events.
The Gettysburg Railroad was merged into a number of other small railroads before it became part of the Western Maryland Railway system, which petitioned the Commonwealth to discontinue passenger service to Gettysburg at the end of 1942, following a steady decline in passenger receipts. After CSX Corporation donated the train station to Gettysburg in the 1990s, a local organization, Main Street Gettysburg, began raising funds for the station’s restoration. Among other pro
motional materials, the group videotaped a public service announcement in which an actor dressed as Lincoln explained the extent of damage to the station from water and the vibration of freight trains that still use the adjacent tracks. Renovations begun in 2005 were completed in 2006 in time for a grand reopening in November. The first floor now houses a museum and information center operated by the National Trust for Historic Gettysburg.
Reliving Lincoln’s Ride
Tourists interested in Lincoln can visit Gettysburg’s Lincoln Train Museum, a building roughly resembling a nineteenthcentury train station that is filled with toy trains, including a Civil War layout that occupies visitors waiting to board the Lincoln Train. Visitors enter a long, narrow auditorium that is furnished like a passenger railroad car. On a screen at the front of the car, they view a moving picture of train tracks, showing them what an engineer would witness from the front of the train. They hear the conversation of those traveling on the train that took Lincoln to Gettysburg.
Just when the tourists think they know what the Lincoln Train ride is all about, the entire room begins to move, imitating the shaking vibration of a vintage train in motion. Even the lantern suspended from the ceiling swings realistically back and forth. The Lincoln Train ride may be pretty tame compared with what tourists can find in today’s theme parks, but it might have been the ancestor of those other simulations, giving it a place in the history of American amusement as well as in the rail-themed attractions of Gettysburg.
A group of York County railroad enthusiasts called Steam into History is currently building a replica Civil War locomotive and passenger coaches, which they plan to operate along the actual Lincoln route on the tracks of the former Northern Central Railway between New Freedom and Hanover Junction. When we visited the refurbished Hanover Junction train station in June 2011, staff members were not sure yet whether we’d be able to ride the proposed oil-burning steam-powered ride by 2013, as reported in a local newspaper.
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