The Reading was once headquartered in Philadelphia on Fourth Street below Walnut, as pictured in this illustration from Philadelphia and Its Environs.
After some modest expansion in the early years of the twentieth century, including the construction of one of the largest locomotive shops of the day in the city of Reading and a concrete bridge spanning the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, business for the Reading Company slowly declined. Starting around 1930, gas and petroleum, as well as other forms of energy, largely replaced coal in both industrial and domestic use, while highway construction and road improvement made automobiles the preferred means of travel for those residing in this region. The Reading Company made a notable attempt to increase its passenger miles by marketing nostalgia with its “Iron Horse Rambles” through the still-scenic coal regions on weekends from 1959 to 1964, but its losses continued to grow.
The Reading Company declared bankruptcy in 1971 but continued to run while the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973 attempted to sort out the difficulties of northeastern railroads. Its commuter lines in and around Philadelphia became part of SEPTA. In 1976, its remaining viable freight lines became part of Conrail, which later sold the Port Richmond freight station. That same year, the Reading Company Technical and Historical Society was established to preserve its history. The organization now numbers about a thousand members in many parts of the United States and even abroad. In 2008, the society opened the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum in a former steel foundry in Hamburg, where its collected equipment, artifacts, and documents can be preserved and shared with the public. The society publishes a quarterly historical magazine, a newsletter, and a popular illustrated calendar. The Anthracite Railroads Historical Society of Lansdale also retains information on this railroad.
The Reading & Northern Railroad
In 1982, Conrail ceased operations on a secondary branch of railroad that had been part of its Harrisburg Division, formerly part of the Pennsy’s Schuylkill Division, leaving a number of Berks County customers without rail connection to Conrail’s main line. They approached a successful local businessman named Andrew Muller Jr. to take over. In 1983, the Blue Mountain & Reading Railroad was formed between the towns of Temple and Hamburg, serving a variety of shippers on an as-needed basis over thirteen miles of track that had been abandoned to the Commonwealth. Thanks to a Commonwealth grant, needed improvements were made to the lines that allowed trains to go faster than ten miles per hour and brought an end to the all-too-frequent derailments.
It may look like a train station, but this is the headquarters of the Reading & Northern Railroad in Port Clinton.
Engine house and rail yard of the Reading & Northern.
By 1990, the railroad was performing so well that Conrail sold Muller its “Reading Cluster,” coal lines extending north from Reading through Port Clinton to points farther north and northwest. This second railroad was incorporated as the Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern (RBMN), commonly called the Reading & Northern. The Blue Mountain & Reading was rolled into this entity in 1995. The following year, the railroad acquired from Conrail more than a hundred miles of trackage that had once been part of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, stretching from Lehighton to Pittston. RBMN connected this system to its Reading Division by reopening an old bridge across the Lehigh River that had been built by the Central Railroad of New Jersey.
By 2010, RBMN was the largest privately owned railroad in the Commonwealth. Many of the railroad’s full-time employees work in its headquarters complex in Port Clinton, whose main buildings were constructed in 1996–98 but designed to resemble a turn-of-the-century, small-town train station. The Victorian décor extends indoors to the architectural ornamentation and furnishings. The conference room, which overlooks the rail yard and engine house, is lined with shelves holding the founder’s collection of model trains. These trains can operate on a track that runs around the room just below the ceiling, on which an RBMN system map is painted.
RBMN serves major businesses in eight counties and interchanges with six other railroads, including Norfolk Southern and Canadian Pacific. Both use the RBMN Lehigh Division to move goods from the northeastern United States and Canada to metropolitan New York and areas south of Reading. RBMN coal trains move out of the coal region over Norfolk Southern tracks. The railroad envisions tremendous potential for growth in the nation’s effort to develop new sources of energy.
In 2010, the Reading & Northern was instrumental in developing something not seen in America for about half a century: a port newly equipped to handle export anthracite coal delivered by rail. Conrail had long ago concentrated its coal exports at the port of Baltimore, which had been sufficient to handle the volume until about 2008. However, in the late 2000s, China decreased the amounts of anthracite coal it exported, opening up new opportunities for Pennsylvania miners to pick up the slack.
The Reading & Northern Railroad spent those same years working with Kinder Morgan, a company specializing in transportation and energy storage. Its port in Fairless Hills was already equipped to receive railcars and load oceangoing vessels but lacked the expensive infrastructure to handle cars that unloaded coal from the bottom. Another company had developed a portable conveyor belt system that could fit beneath a railroad coal car and roll out the coal as the car was emptied. The equipment was tested while RBMN developed a retrofit to make it work optimally with the company’s railroad cars.
The Reading & Northern Railroad is perfectly positioned geographically to serve developing businesses extracting natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, a geological formation extending in Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Scranton. In partnership with its customer D & I Silica, RBMN is reengineering the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s old Pittston rail yard into a facility designed to serve the needs of Marcellus Shale drillers. In 2010, the railroad acquired a short line between Towanda and Monroeton, which is connected to its main line by track owned by Norfolk Southern, also to serve the Marcellus Shale developers. That same year, RBMN won the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association’s marketing award for its efforts at the Pittston yard. In 2011, Railway Age magazine named it the Regional Railroad of the Year for its work at Fairless Hills.
The Reading & Northern operates two passenger divisions. Its Reading & Northern Passenger Department has operated excursion trains from Wyoming and Lackawanna Counties to the picturesque mountain town of Jim Thorpe, as well as regular fall foliage excursions from Port Clinton to Jim Thorpe. Passengers ride in 1920s-era coaches or a 1927 Pullman car. In 2005, the railroad created its Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, which takes tourists visiting Jim Thorpe into the Lehigh Gorge on trains sometimes powered by the railroad’s restored steam engine. Passengers cross the Lehigh River and follow its winding path through Glen Onoko to the town of Old Penn Haven.
The SEDACOG JRA
In the early 1980s, around the same time that the Blue Mountain & Reading Railroad was being organized, businesses in several counties in the Susquehanna River valley discovered that Conrail planned to abandon as unprofitable the short-line rail service they depended on. This would mean not just the loss of service, but also the removal of tracks. Some firms could ship and receive by truck, but others would have to relocate or shut down, which would result in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs and would be economic bad news for the entire region.
A regional organization called the Susquehanna Economic Development Association–Council of Governments (SEDACOG) already had been keeping an eye on central Pennsylvania’s rail freight situation ever since the bankruptcies of the region’s Class I’s, and it had a task force in place. Formed in 1957, SEDACOG was a planning and development agency that had a track record of dealing with flood control, business promotion, housing rehabilitation, and other concerns that crossed county lines. At that time, it was a million-dollar operation, but it had never actually run a railroad, so the formation of its Joint Rail Authority (JRA) in 1983 was a bold move.
SEDACOG JRA proposed to purchase
several lines in danger of Conrail abandonment and contract with a private operator to continue rail service. By 1984, the authority had negotiated terms with Conrail, and both parties had signed a sale agreement for eighty-two miles of track serving twenty-two customers on what Conrail had called its Bloomsburg Branch and Centre County Cluster. SEDACOG JRA renamed the lines the North Shore Railroad and the Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad. The authority’s immediate priority was to rehabilitate its physical plant. Its executive director, Jeff Stover, described the North Shore nee Bloomsburg Branch as “two strips of rust in the weeds,” on which trains could move no faster than ten miles per hour and a trip from Berwick to Northumberland took two days. Funding came from federal, state, and local sources, including the industries that depended on rail service.
In 1985, residents of the Shamokin area in Northumberland County learned that Conrail planned to abandon their communities’ rail lines. By 1987, the Commonwealth had committed funding toward the acquisition of these lines, which was matched by the rail users and other local authorities. Two years later, the Shamokin Valley Railroad between Mount Carmel and Sunbury joined the SEDACOG JRA.
Growth was slow until 1996, a turning point for the authority. That year, Conrail put up for sale its Lewistown Cluster and its lines in the Williamsport area. At the same time, Conrail management realized that the railroad could shorten the route for trains carrying coal from southwest Pennsylvania to a power plant in Washingtonville if they could run over the Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad. SEDACOG JRA and Conrail struck a deal in which Conrail sold its lines for $1 plus trackage rights over the Nittany & Bald Eagle. Both lines, now called the Juniata Valley Railroad, and the Lycoming Valley Railroad, have contributed greatly to the authority’s subsequent growth.
Today SEDACOG JRA’s five railroads operate over two hundred miles of track. The vast majority of its current customers have signed on since the authority was established. All five railroads enjoy the benefits of connections with Norfolk Southern, and four of them connect with what has long been known as the Buffalo Line, which consists of parts of the old PRR and Northern Central line between Harrisburg and Sunbury, plus the old Philadelphia & Erie between Sunbury and Erie, with a northern terminus now in Buffalo. When portions of the Buffalo Line passed from Conrail to Norfolk Southern, NS removed its own through freight but kept the line open to serve connecting railroads.
A booklet published for SEDACOG JRA’s twenty-fifth anniversary reports that many area businesses were planning expansions and the authority anticipated adding customers on each of its lines. In 2011, Jeff Stover noted that business was driving infrastructure development aside from the shale gas industry, but when one added in the demands of companies exploiting the Marcellus Shale, “we’ve now moved into warp speed.”
The shale gas industry has been a tremendous boon for railroads that can deliver needed commodities as close as possible to the well pads. SEDACOG JRA just reaches the edge of current Marcellus Shale development, yet its deliveries of sand for the hydraulic fracturing process, known as “frack sand,” increased from two thousand cars in 2008 to more than seven thousand cars in 2011. The authority has added thirteen or fourteen new Marcellus Shale–related sidings. In Williamsport, the Lycoming Valley Railroad’s Newberry Yard has been transformed into a state-of-the-art transportation hub. “We do not see it abating,” Stover commented.
Though SEDACOG JRA does not have a passenger division with regularly scheduled excursions, the authority does join forces with local organizers such as historical societies and visitors bureaus to deliver motive power and privately owned passenger cars for special events. In 2011, fall foliage and Christmas excursions departed from Williamsport, Bellefonte, and Bloomsburg. Danville’s Iron Heritage Days Festival and Shamokin’s Anthracite Heritage Festival also featured train rides.
During the spring and summer, a subsidiary of the North American Railcar Operators Association (NARCOA) called Central Pennsylvania Excursions runs excursion trains made up of individually owned “speeders,” railroad motor cars that workers formerly used to inspect and maintain trackage, on the North Shore Railroad, the Shamokin Valley Railroad, the Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad, and the Lycoming Valley Railroad, as well as other Pennsylvania short lines. The public is invited to see these railroad motor cars decorated for Christmas at the annual Toys for Tots ride in December.
Rail Stories of the Region
The Danville & Pottsville Rail Road
In the summer of 1829, the Miners’ Journal reported from Pottsville, “A new era of things is rapidly approaching at this place, which is of vital importance to citizens, generally—we mean the extension of rail roads throughout the coal district.” At about the same time that the founders of the Reading system were planning to link Schuylkill County’s coalfields by rail to Philadelphia, an equally ambitious project was born at the courthouse in Sunbury. Sometimes called the Central Rail Road, the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road was intended to run from the Schuylkill County coal region, through the coalfields farther north at Shamokin and Mahanoy Mountain, to the Susquehanna River at Danville and the town called Sunbury, which was strategically located at the confluence of the Susquehanna’s northern and western branches.
Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania attributed the idea for this project to Gen. Daniel Montgomery, one of Pennsylvania’s canal commissioners and a resident of Danville, who died before much construction was under way. The concept was eagerly adopted by residents of Northumberland and Columbia Counties, and Stephen Girard became its advocate and largest shareholder.
Two years earlier, in the summer of 1828, Montgomery had secured the services of Moncure Robinson and instructed him to survey the topography between Sunbury, Danville, and Pottsville to determine whether such a project was even possible. In two separate reports, Robinson declared there was a route over which a double-track railroad could be built for locomotive power, but it would require a tunnel eight hundred feet long and no less than nine inclined planes.
“In the summer of 1832, the formation of the Eastern division of the road was commenced in conformity with the desire of Mr. Girard [who had died in 1831],” Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania reported in December 1835. Stephen Girard had also imported English iron to plate the rails and established sawmills and other industrial businesses in Girardville, the town named in his honor. By 1834, a ten-mile railroad stretched from the Mount Carbon Railroad, a feeder connecting with the Schuylkill Canal, to the pioneer town of Girardville. These ten miles accounted for about a third of the entire project, “not in length, but in expense and labor,” Hazard’s Register reported that year. The tunnel had been constructed and so had a number of inclined planes, most notably the Mahanoy Plane, which was 1,625 feet long and 350 feet high.
Construction of the western portion of the railroad started in the summer of 1834. This twenty-mile length of track was supposed to connect the Shamokin coalfield with one of the State Works canals on the Susquehanna at Sunbury to give miners yet another route for shipping coal and to haul the produce of farmers in the upper valleys of the Susquehanna in the opposite direction. In 1835, Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania confidently predicted, “Thus a rapid and reciprocal trade, of the most advantageous nature, will be prosecuted, by a route seventy miles nearer than the Schuylkill Canal.”
Such great expectations were never realized, however, and thus the region’s other big idea never attained the success of the Reading system. By 1835, the tracks of the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road ran from Sunbury to Shamokin, but the eastern and western portions of this enterprise would never be connected. Sale of the railroad’s bonds dropped off after the deaths of Girard and Montgomery. The railroad also lost the services of Moncure Robinson, who went to work for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, even suggesting that work on the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road be halted because little was being done in Sunbury to construct a means for getting coal from the trains into the canal. More unfortunate still, the western tr
acks had been constructed in a way that caused frequent locomotive derailments, making it necessary for the railroad to return to literal horsepower. This dampened the hopes of investors for profitability throughout the nineteenth century, and the line changed hands several times before its western portion was acquired by the Pennsylvania Railroad and its eastern section, which included the inclined planes, was absorbed into the Reading system.
The Mahanoy Plane as depicted in Philadelphia and Its Environs.
According to James L. Holton’s history of the Reading, the most dramatic feature of the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road and its most enduring artifact was the Mahanoy Plane. This engineering feature long served as a model for other railroad engineers and became a regional landmark and tourist attraction, remaining part of Girardville’s landscape well into the twentieth century.
The Molly Maguires
The role Franklin B. Gowen played in ridding Pennsylvania’s southern coalfields of what was believed to be a secret terrorist organization, popularly called the Molly Maguires, made him a hero to his genteel contemporaries but a villain to modern historians with prolabor sensibilities. By 1874, under his leadership, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad had acquired coal lands estimated at a hundred thousand acres served by nearly a hundred collieries. In 1873, he had met in New York with the presidents of several Pennsylvania coal and railroad concerns to agree on quotes and set the rate for coal shipment at $5 per ton, an arrangement sometimes called America’s first cartel or incidence of price fixing. While Gowen was not antilabor, per se, empty freight cars were not welcome in this scenario, so he used contract labor to break a miners’ strike mounted by the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association in 1875.
The miners, mainly Irishmen in this region, found themselves back at their dangerous and filthy work despite their grievances. In Ireland, they had had to contend with landlords and rent agents, so being pressured into renting company-owned housing and purchasing their goods at a company store may have seemed familiarly galling. Though some historians have expressed doubt that an organization called the Molly Maguires formally existed, most concede that certain Irish miners joined a secret organization that took its name from an Irish widow who had once led an antilandlord movement and operated through a legal fraternal association called the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 14