Lorett Treese Travels
On a humid Sunday in June, Mat took me out for brunch at the elegant Accomac Inn on the western shore of the Susquehanna, and it was a good thing, too, because our destination that day was Muddy Creek Forks, which is located in the Middle of Nowhere, York County. While I dined on eggs Benedict, we sat on a screened porch overlooking the river. We could hear the sounds of Norfolk Southern freight trains passing on the opposite shore as we consulted our maps and found that our destination was too insignificant to appear. We were left with the website directions to the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society.
After we finished our brunch, we proceeded to the town of Brogue, turning right at the general store. Just as we arrived in a little hollow with a stream, a railroad crossing, and a collection of vintage buildings, it began to pour. It rained so hard that we could not leave the car. We began to wonder if we were actually going to get to ride a train that day, considering the kinds of trains that roll on the tracks hereabouts.
But the rain finally let up, and we made for the restored building that once served as the local general store, post office, and train station, where a costumed interpreter stepped out to greet us. Wearing a white shirt and suspenders, he told us that we had arrived in the year 1915 in Muddy Creek Forks. He mentioned the threefold preservation effort unfolding here: preservation of the railroad, restoration of railroad equipment, and preservation and interpretation of the town. Visitors can go to Williamsburg and see an old town, and they can go to Strasburg and ride an old train, but Muddy Creek Forks, he assured us, will be a place where they can do both. He led us into the store and sold us tickets from the original ticket booth emblazoned with an original sign that said, “Spitting Prohibited.”
Waiting outside was a motorcar train, also known as a speeder, consisting of locomotives on either end with one closed car and two open cars in the middle. Our train had only seven passengers, and one of the crew members punched our ticket before we boarded. Needless to say, a conductor would not be able to move from car to car to do this while we were en route. After getting the crew’s permission, Mat and I stepped into the lead engine, a Fairmont A8 constructed in the 1940s and intended to haul up to fourteen maintenance workers to locations along the tracks. Neither of us had ever done a speeder excursion, nor had we ever ridden in the cab. The controls we could see included several levers located in the middle of the car and what appeared to be a broken broomstick jutting up at an angle at the rear. A crew member told us that was their “gas gauge.” I promised not to lean on it.
As the train slowly started off, we immediately felt the sensation of moving uphill. We proceeded at a low speed on tracks paralleling Muddy Creek, which was certainly living up to its name, and rounded some of the curves that the Ma & Pa was famous for. Our engineer used the horn liberally, having spotted some kids walking in the gauge before we left the station. The train slowed down still further as we approached a grade crossing, and two crew members got off to stop traffic with flags. We passed through with the horn blaring. We slowed to a crawl as we moved through someone’s backyard where the residents were having a family picnic.
We passed through a railroad cut and continued to follow the meandering path of Muddy Creek. The crew members told us to look for wildlife such as eagles, cranes, and deer. From our vantage point in the cab, we spotted a deer leaping across the tracks. We also saw what we thought was an eagle rising from the creek’s surface, but we were too far away to see whether it had captured any lunch. The crew members told us they sometimes see people on horseback or navigating the creek in kayaks, but none were out the day we visited.
The primitive nature of our train precluded any kind of formal narration, but sitting with the crew exposed us to their informal chatter, some of which we speculated was conducted for our benefit. “You gotta be gentle with these wet rails,” one guy commented to our engineer. Another informed us, “The worst thing we ever had was one day when the entire track was covered with caterpillars; it was just like glass.” As we went around a curve, a crew member told us that this railroad had been known for its “screaming flanges,” the railroad term for the sound made by the car’s wheels as it rounded tight curves. They also pointed out the spot where they had cut up a fallen tree limb earlier that morning when they made their inspection tour. And while we proceeded through the grade crossing, the engineer commented, “Don’t get scared now, but this is only the third time I’ve run this train.” Two of the crew members moved to the locomotive at the other end of the train for the ride back, leaving us with just one guy, “in case we need more brakes.”
What I liked best about the trip was my proximity to the tracks. Looking out the open window between our car and the one behind it, I could see the wheels turning on the rails and the condition of the ties between them. And I could see the water between the ties as we crossed several trestles over little tributaries of Muddy Creek.
I also got a clear look at how much work the preservation society had put into the railroad. I could see where the bank of the creek had been rebuilt and reinforced. And at the end of the line, I could see the tracks disappearing into the grass where brush had already been cleared preparatory to restoring the line a little bit farther.
The Region’s Rail-Trails
Surrounding the city of Harrisburg, linking its parks and other open places, is a twenty-mile trail known as the Capital Area Greenbelt. The Capital Area Greenbelt Association (CAGA) manages this recreational facility, which incorporates a segment of rail line that once ran between Harrisburg and Steelton and was abandoned in 1982.
The idea for a park encircling the Commonwealth’s capital dates from the early twentieth century. The project was revived in 1990, when CAGA was organized. Hikers in particularly good condition can walk all the way from the riverfront to the National Civil War Museum, located atop a hill in Harrisburg’s Reservoir Park. The most attractive and interesting portion of the Greenbelt stretches along the Susquehanna River. Near the state capitol building, where the trail passes the home of John Harris, founder of Harrisburg, users get a view of the various downtown bridges spanning the Susquehanna.
Heritage Rail Trail County Park is a popular recreation destination in York County.
In York County, the Heritage Rail Trail County Park stretches from the historic district of York south to the Mason-Dixon line, where it joins the Northern Central Rail Trail in Maryland. Originally part of the Baltimore & Susquehanna Rail Road, this route was subsequently in the hands of the Northern Central Railway, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Penn Central Railroad. After the corridor was greatly damaged by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, it was rebuilt by the Commonwealth for freight in 1985, but little business materialized. York County purchased it in 1990 and completed the trail in 1999.
In the ensuing years, it has become extremely popular with bicyclists, who flock to the parking areas at its access points and spend the day on the trail, which is well maintained by the York County Department of Parks and Recreation. Much of the trail runs through shady woods along the pleasant Codorus Creek. Here and there, trail users find benches and picnic tables. The trail passes through the Howard Tunnel, which promotional literature calls “the oldest operational tunnel in the nation.” This claim may or may not be true. Completed in 1838, the Howard Tunnel is just slightly older than the Black Rock Tunnel in Phoenixville, but which tunnel was officially placed in operation first is not clear. In any case, since the trail proceeds through the tunnel, it offers hikers and rail fans a great opportunity to examine an early railroad engineering feature.
Trail users also pass through Glen Rock, Seven Valleys, and the town named Railroad, whose growth was prompted and promoted by the railroad’s existence. The owners of restaurants, taverns, and grocery stores in these towns have noticed an increase in business thanks to the trail users. Along the trail as well are two railroad stations now refurbished as museums. The New Freedom Train Station has been restored to its appe
arance from the 1940s, when it was a stop on the busy Northern Central Railroad. The Hanover Junction Train Station, located where the Northern Central Railway and the Hanover Branch Railroad met, has been restored to its 1863 appearance. Its exhibits include extensive coverage of the recent restoration of this station and a Civil War room with an interesting reproduction of a photograph taken in the fall of 1863, showing a tall man in a stovepipe hat standing just outside the station. Could it be Lincoln? Both museums are open to the public mainly on weekends from May to October. In 2010, the Hanover Junction Train Station held a series of talks on subjects of local interest.
The recently restored station at Hanover Junction now houses a small museum.
The pleasant Lititz Warwick Trailway in Lancaster County.
Currently under development in southern Lancaster County is the Enola Low-Grade Trail. Norfolk Southern owned this twenty-three-mile corridor between Atglen in western Chester County and Safe Harbor on the Susquehanna River, but the railroad relinquished it to the townships through which it passed in 2008. In 2011, after being closed for an Amtrak power line project, it was reopened with a crushed stone surface.
In Lititz in northern Lancaster County, near where the real railroad tracks end, lies the Lititz Warwick Trailway. Though it’s currently less than a mile long, plans are in place to make it part of a trail system being developed by Warwick Township and Lititz Borough.
East of the Susquehanna, the region’s other rail-trails include the Middle Creek Trail, Lebanon Valley Rail-Trail, Conoy Canal Trail, Lancaster Junction Trail, Conewago Recreation Trail, and Northwest Lancaster County River Trail in Lancaster County; the Lykens Valley Rail Trail and Stony Valley Railroad Grade in Dauphin County; and the Swatara Rail-Trail in Lebanon County. Across the river, Cumberland County’s rail-trails include the LeTort Spring Run Nature Trail, Cumberland County Biker/Hiker Trail, and Cumberland Valley Rail-Trail. Perry County has the Iron Horse Trail and Newport and Shermans Valley Railroad Trace. The Chambersburg Rail-Trail is in Franklin County. In York County, the trailhead for the Red Lion Mile is in the town of Red Lion at a train station that once served the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad and now houses the Red Lion Historical Society.
SECTION THREE
Valleys of the Schuylkill and Susquehanna
Great and Growing Railways of the Region
The Reading
According to a report of the Coal Mining Association published in Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania in 1833, “The year 1825 may be considered as the era from which we may date the fair introduction of anthracite coal,” meaning by that time it was generally acknowledged that the anthracite coal discovered in Schuylkill and Lehigh Counties would become a superior alternative to the use of wood as fuel. As early as 1813, independent miners started floating coal downstream to Philadelphia on the Schuylkill River on boats they called “arks,” and by 1828, two canals stretched toward the coalfields: the Union Canal, linking Reading on the Schuylkill River with Middletown on the Susquehanna River; and the Schuylkill Canal, completed by the Schuylkill Navigation Company in 1825 and sometimes known simply as the Schuylkill Navigation, linking Port Clinton with Philadelphia.
Although the Union-Schuylkill Canal system continued to function for many years, it shared the drawbacks of all canals. A number of accounts written between 1815 and 1830 refer to particular problems with the Schuylkill Canal, including frequent breaks in its banks that required expensive repairs and rebuilding. Surely there was a better way to get anthracite coal to potential customers.
In his history of the Reading system, James L. Holton traces the origin of this railroad to the Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad, & Coal Company, founded in 1826 by Isaac Hiester and Friedrich List, both of Reading. Although this enterprise originally was organized to build a feeder canal linking a coalfield to the Schuylkill Canal, its charter allowed for either a canal or a railroad. Holton contends that the founders signaled they had bigger plans when they had the charter amended in 1829 to extend operations from Port Clinton, the terminus of the Schuylkill Canal, to Reading; secured the support of wealthy Philadelphia merchant and investor Stephen Girard; and hired engineer Moncure Robinson. “Instead of providing a service in getting coal from the mines to the canal,” Holton writes, “it meant the railway intended to compete with the [Schuylkill] canal in reaching the anthracite market.” Their Little Schuylkill Railroad, following the Little Schuylkill River from Port Clinton to Tamaqua, was in operation by 1831.
This illustration from the Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania depicts the Schuylkill corridor where train tracks ran parallel to the canal.
In 1833, the Commonwealth granted a charter to a second entity, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company. Jules Irwin Bogen notes in The Anthracite Railroads: A Study in American Railroad Enterprise that the Philadelphia & Reading’s investors were friendly toward the Little Schuylkill operation; in fact, they “apparently planned to operate the two lines, when built, as a single through route.” Their line would connect with the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Railroad, as well as with the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad (the old State Works, later part of the Pennsylvania Railroad), eventually making it not only an important anthracite railroad that greatly aided development in the lower coal region of Pennsylvania, but also a major passenger carrier and a rival to the Pennsy for Philadelphia-area commuter traffic.
The engineer Moncure Robinson surveyed the Schuylkill River valley from Port Clinton to Reading and from Reading to Philadelphia beginning in 1835. The railroad he designed was an engineering marvel for its time: its roadbed was graded in a way that allowed any number of loaded cars to be hauled to Philadelphia and returned empty by the same locomotive. The project was the largest private railroad enterprise actually under way in the Commonwealth at the time, and the Panic of 1837 brought both challenge and opportunity. To secure needed capital, its determined managers sought aid from the banking firm of McCalmont Brothers & Company in England; the Little Schuylkill Railroad had already received aid from the British banking firm of Gowan and Marx. The same panic probably caused the Little Schuylkill managers to relinquish their rights to build between Port Clinton and Reading to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which got the rights extended to Mount Carbon the following year, 1838. In 1842, the Reading ran its first train the full ninety-four miles from Mount Carbon in the heart of coal country to Philadelphia.
Robinson chose the estate of Joseph Ball on the Delaware as the location for the first five piers and intermediate basins of the Philadelphia & Reading’s Philadelphia terminal for receiving and shipping cargo. The place was already known as Richmond Hall, which would have appealed to Robinson, a native Virginian born in Richmond. The railroad opened a connecting line across the Schuylkill with the Falls Bridge, and by the early twentieth century, Port Richmond was more than a mile long, covered 140 acres, and was the largest such operation in the world under the management of one company.
The third quarter of the nineteenth century was very profitable for the expanding company. The Philadelphia & Reading acquired or leased many lateral or formerly independent “feeder” lines. It financed construction of the Lebanon Valley Railroad from Reading to Harrisburg, offering Pennsylvanians a different route between Philadelphia and the capital, while also siphoning off some of the Pennsy’s Cumberland Valley traffic. In 1870, its old competitor, the Schuylkill Navigation Company, leased its canal to the Philadelphia & Reading, which gradually abandoned it and allowed it to decay.
It does not appear that the early investors and managers of the Philadelphia & Reading intended to mine as well as transport coal, but Franklin B. Gowen, who was elected president of the company in 1870, decided that the railroad should purchase the coal lands it served, freeing it from dangerous competition from other railroads. In 1871, Gowen created an entity called the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company to hold his real estate acquisitions. In his book on anthracite railroads, Bogen notes that “by
buying its coal land estate of 100,000 acres, the Reading assured itself of a regular source of traffic. It did not, however, obtain assurance that this traffic would be profitable.” Gowen’s ambitious plans drove the Philadelphia & Reading into receivership in 1880 and lost the railroad its European investors two years later.
A Reading train nears the town of Reading circa 1875, as depicted in Philadelphia and Its Environs.
Gowen also had the misfortune of making enemies of the powerful John D. Rockefeller and the future president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander J. Cassatt. At Gowen’s urging, William H. Vanderbilt acquired a substantial interest in the Philadelphia & Reading, bringing Gowen into the syndicate that was then planning construction of the South Pennsylvania Railroad, which was intended to compete with the Pennsy. Gowen also joined several oil well operators in northwestern Pennsylvania in their plans to construct a pipeline from Bradford to Williamsport, where oil could be transported via the Reading system, which would have freed the oilmen from the monopoly of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.
While the railroad was on the verge of a second bankruptcy, Gowen resigned in 1883 and J. P. Morgan, the famous banker and financier, made peace between the Reading and the Pennsy and organized a trust of bankers that would direct the affairs of the company for five years. Morgan stepped in a second time to reorganize the company during a receivership that lasted from 1893 to 1897, incurred by an ambitious expansion program of another of the Reading’s more colorful presidents, A. A. McLeod, who had leased the Lehigh Valley Railroad and opened the Reading’s elaborate new terminal and headquarters in Philadelphia. Both the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company were absorbed by a holding company, the Reading Company. In 1896, the Reading Company formed the Philadelphia & Reading Railway Company to conduct its railroad operations. After further mergers and corporate streamlining, the Reading Company in 1923 became the operating company.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 13