The Outer Station was one of a number of civic improvements made to Reading during the 1860s and 1870s that caused the neighborhood along the old Centre Turnpike to Sunbury to become a place for wealthy industrialists to build their mansions. Now a well-maintained neighborhood, the Centre Park Historic District has elegant examples of just about every architectural style popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The historic district is home to the Historical Society of Berks County, which occupies a building completed in 1928. Its museum is not known for railroad artifacts, per se, but it has a “Transportation Room” on its lower level with artifacts of the Reading Railroad. On the first floor is a large model of a 1917 Reading locomotive built for display at the 1939 World’s Fair. Images of trains are captured in many of the paintings on exhibit, including a painting of the Outer Station train yard with its Swinging Bridge. The museum also has a bust of Friedrich List, whose label identifies him as a railroad pioneer and the original editor of the Readinger Adler, today the Reading Eagle.
The Reading Railroad Heritage Museum
Following a long search for a permanent home, the Reading Company Technical & Historical Society finally opened its Reading Railroad Heritage Museum in an old foundry complex in Hamburg. The year 2011 marked the grand opening of the museum’s main exhibit room. Though not yet quite as massive as the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania or the tribute to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad at Steamtown, the new museum is part of an ongoing development effort and certainly worth a visit.
The society got its start in 1976, when about a dozen members began meeting in Reading and collecting Reading Railroad memorabilia. For a while they adopted Reading’s Outer Station until it was destroyed by fire. The group moved to a former Reading station in Elverson, then to Leesport, along the tracks of what was then the Blue Mountain & Reading Railroad. There they stored the Reading locomotives and rolling stock they continued to collect and maintained a small museum.
Planning for the current museum began around 2000. Today its guided yard tours begin with a look at the interior and exterior plans for the finished museum, which will include an outdoor turntable and an enclosed restoration area where volunteers can work, indoor and outdoor rolling stock storage areas, and spaces for permanent and changing museum exhibits.
Outside in the yard, the locomotives and cars are lined up on parallel rows of tracks. Most of the artifacts formerly stored in Leesport have been moved to this location but additional tracks are being installed for rolling stock still stored at other locations. Some of the artifacts appear to be in the process of restoration, while others are simply awaiting the proper resources. The yard tour is great if you want to study the evolution of locomotives used by the Reading or the changes made by the railroad in how they were painted; the guide explains both. When we visited, however, we got to enter only one car, a caboose, whose interior features our guide used to explain the jobs done by railroad workers on a moving train.
The rail yard behind the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum.
The museum has quite a bit of old Reading office equipment, as well as the control tower console from Lebanon Valley Junction. Everything is well labeled, and the signage is new and helpful for interpreting the Reading’s place in the lives of different categories of people, such as laborers versus travelers. A good percentage of the floor space is occupied by the society’s modular model railroad depicting scenes along real Reading lines.
The site’s future floor plan reserves space for archival storage and research. The society rescued files from the Reading’s Mechanical Department, and members also possess that department’s negative files. The museum is adding to its archival collection with privately donated photographs, maps, and blueprints. Members meet from time to time for “archives sorting sessions.”
Back when the society’s locomotives and rolling stock were located in Leesport, it sometimes operated passenger excursions. The society envisioned future passenger excursions in northern Berks and southern Schuylkill counties. It is possible that passenger excursions might someday operate from the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum, but not anytime in the near future because of the poor condition of the tracks.
Port Clinton
North of Reading, where considerable truck and automobile traffic moves along the Schuylkill corridor on busy Route 61, in the Schuylkill Gap at the border between Berks and Schuylkill Counties lies a town called Port Clinton. Once the important terminus of the Schuylkill Canal, this town was named after DeWitt Clinton, founder of the Erie Canal. Today the place is familiar mainly to hikers because the Appalachian Trail runs practically through it. Motorists rarely stop here, unless the local police pull them over for ignoring the speed limit postings of thirty-five miles per hour.
According to James L. Holton’s history of the Reading system, Port Clinton is the historic location of “the oldest existing railroad-associated structure in the United States.” Among its other modest early-nineteenthcentury buildings stands a two-story house built between 1830 and 1833 for the use of engineer Moncure Robinson. At one time housing the local post office as well as the office where Robinson and his assistants worked, the Moncure Robinson House is now identified only by a sign on its front porch attesting to its noble history.
Nineteenthcentury guidebooks described Port Clinton as the gateway between rolling farm country and the more wild and rugged topography of the coal region. The Schuylkill River’s course through the town is different today, because the Reading Company actually shifted it in 1926 by cutting off an oxbow, eliminating the need for two bridges and a tunnel that would have ill accommodated the heavier trains then coming into use.
Port Clinton has a tiny transportation museum, an independent, community-run establishment located in a small two-story structure that used to be a school. A phone number is posted by the door for those who want to arrange a visit.
The Reading & Northern Railroad’s corporate headquarters is across the river from the town proper and reached by a railroad bridge, one lane of which has been adapted for automobiles. Nothing here is open to the general public, so the best time to visit would be when the railroad is operating fall foliage passenger excursions from this location.
This illustration of a Reading train traveling north of Port Clinton appeared in Philadelphia and Its Environs, published in 1875.
Is this the nation’s “oldest railroad-associated structure”? The house was built for Moncure Robinson between 1830 and 1833 in Port Clinton.
Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Inc.
Though not as well known or popular for passenger excursions as the Strasburg Rail Road, the Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Inc. Railroad (WK&S) has much in common with it. Both are located in places that draw tourists for other reasons. The village of Kempton is not far from Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a refuge for birds of prey visited by many bird-watchers and wildlife enthusiasts, particularly in the fall when eagles, falcons, and hawks are migrating.
Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Inc. was chartered in 1963 and began excursions that Memorial Day on tracks that had originally been part of the 1874 Berks County Railroad, running north from Reading through the valley of Maiden Creek to Slatington. The railroad was later incorporated into the Reading system. Early ridership on the WK&S was poor, however, and the tourist railroad was temporarily closed in 1968 but reorganized in 1970 under new management.
Also like the Strasburg Rail Road, most of the buildings in the little WK&S complex in Kempton where passengers now board trains were not original to the site, though most have some connection with the Reading Company. The passenger station was relocated in 1963 from the village of Joanna, the gift shop was a freight station in Catasauqua, and the refreshment stand started out as a railroad maintenance shed in Lehigh County. The WK&S locomotives and rolling stock all started out elsewhere as well. The railroad’s newest acquisition is a steam locomotive built by Baldwin in 1914, which arrived at the site in 2008
via multiple trucks.
Preparing for operation at the Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern.
The WK&S offers train rides from May to November, including special excursions like its Easter Bunny Express, Murder Mystery Train, Pumpkin Express, and Santa Claus Special. Its Harvest Moon Special and late-October Train of Terror operate at night. A local winery hosts a Wine and Cheese Rail Excursion. Private charters are available. On Sundays, passengers can also visit the Schuylkill & Lehigh Model Railroad Club, whose layout is located in a passenger car behind the station.
Remains of the Marriage of Coal Mining and Railroad Transportation
Farther up the Schuylkill corridor, Route 61 winds through the town of Ashland, an excellent location for studying the relationship of Pennsylvania’s mining and railroad industries. Since 1963, visitors have been learning about mining at Ashland’s Pioneer Tunnel, named after the Pioneer Colliery on Mahanoy Mountain. The colliery was part of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company from 1911 to 1931, when its mining operations were shut down. The mine cars are running again in the retimbered tunnel, taking tourists to see just how cramped, dark, and intensely cold the mines were while they hear about a miner’s life from a guide who may have once held such a job.
The site also has a specialized railroad powered by the Henry Clay, a narrow-gauge locomotive that is known colloquially as a “lokie.” Such engines were used by the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company to move loads of coal from strip mines after steam-powered shovels chewed their way into coal veins. The Henry Clay now pulls passengers around the side of Mahanoy Mountain, where visitors can witness other artifacts of the region’s mining industry, including a bootleg coal hole—an unofficial and often unsafe mine dug by miners in their spare time without the formality of obtaining deeds or creating corporations.
From the vantage point of the train, passengers can also make out the nearby ghost town of Centralia. In 1962, a fire started in the mines beneath Centralia when something ignited in a trash dump located over a coal vein, and the flames quickly spread underground. For more than a decade, millions of dollars were spent on efforts to put the fire out. In 1984, Congress approved $42 million for the relocation of Centralia’s residents and businesses. More than five hundred people moved, but a few hardy souls remained. Those intrigued enough to drive through what is left of Centralia will see isolated and shored-up structures that were once row homes. Some blocks have sidewalks but no remaining buildings. Soon only Centralia’s cemeteries may stand as evidence that anyone ever lived on this desolate hilltop.
The steam lokie called the Henry Clay prepares to accept passengers in Ashland.
CNJ engine No. 113, currently being restored along with the train station in Minersville.
While driving through Minersville in recent years, we’ve noted rolling stock appearing at the train station, which was built in 1913 as part of the Reading system. We were sure we had spotted a caboose and passenger cars, so on Memorial Day weekend in 2011, we decided to stop and take a look. On a siding adjacent to the tracks now used by the Reading & Northern Railroad, we spotted Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) steam locomotive No. 113, which appeared to be in the final stages of a full restoration.
We then learned about a railway restoration project, headed by Robert E. Kimmel Jr. and manned by volunteers, established to restore both the locomotive and the depot. The locomotive had been built for the CNJ in 1923 but was sold to the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company in 1953. It subsequently became the property of the Reading Anthracite Company. It is one of only two surviving CNJ steam locomotives. The plan was to get the engine ready to run, then find a place to operate passenger excursions. When we visited, the passenger cars were on another siding just north of the station, apparently waiting for business to get started.
Girardville, Tamaqua, and Gowen City (Molly Maguire Country)
A great deal of fanfare marked the 1834 opening of the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road to Girardville. According to a report of the Committee of Inland Navigation published in Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania in February of that year, this meant that “the great coal region beyond the Broad Mountain (which until now was inaccessible) is connected with the improvements on the Schuylkill.” Later that year, the same publication carried information on Moncure Robinson’s Mahanoy Plane, which carried coal or passengers at a rate of four to six miles per hour up or down the mountain to or from the Mahanoy Creek in the valley below.
Located just east of Ashland, Girardville still bears the name of Stephen Girard, who once owned vast amounts of property in this area and provided the financial support for all the important transportation projects in his day, including the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road; the Little Schuylkill Railroad, which grew into the Reading system; and the Schuylkill Canal. When Stephen Girard died in 1831, he left cash and real estate worth more than $6 million to the city of Philadelphia, an estate that today is one of many trusts administered by the Board of Directors of City Trusts.
The Mahanoy Plane, which was demolished in the 1950s, is missing from modern Girardville, but a private residence popularly called the “Girard Mansion” still sits on a hill overlooking a road that just skirts the town. This large but modest and unornamented dwelling was the home of William Boyd, the first supervisor of land in this area. At a corner nearby, a small brick building dating from 1888 that once was the estate office is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. When I researched the first edition of this book, the office was still in the hands of the Girard Estate, which stored records there and administered a local assistance program. By the spring of 2011, the structure had been renovated inside and out by its new owner, the president of the Keystone Anthracite Corporation. No one was in the building on the day we visited or we would have asked for a tour.
The old office of the Girard Estate in Girardville was purchased and remodeled by the Keystone Anthracite Corporation.
The restored train station in Tamaqua houses a restaurant and anchors a downtown park. The adjacent tracks belong to the Reading & Northern.
Tamaqua was an important mining town, now known as the final resting place for a number of Molly Maguires, including John Kehoe. Its former Reading passenger station constructed in 1874 now serves as a town heritage center housing a restaurant and shops. I had a tough time taking a picture of the place for the first edition, because the area immediately surrounding the station was littered with construction debris. In 2011, however, the station was surrounded by a pleasant town park with a gazebo and fountain. We had lunch in the bar at an establishment called the Restaurant at the Station, which was furnished in Victorian décor and staffed by waitresses dressed in long, ruffled skirts and white blouses, not quite like Harvey Girls, but close. On the walls of the bar were photographs of twentieth-century Reading trains and equipment, and swing-era music was playing on the sound system. The food was good, especially the gourmet pierogies.
All around this town, instead of the deteriorating artifacts of abandoned industry, we noticed new mining operations, and the roads were busy with trucks sporting new logos. We even spotted several signs posted along the roads saying, “Coal drivers wanted.” The mines are definitely back in business.
Founded in 1835, Gowen City was named for Franklin B. Gowen. Whatever community occupied this hillside crossroads upon its founding must have borne some other name at the time, however, for Gowen was not born until 1836. Gowen may have seen this area for the first time at the age of nineteen, while he was managing a furnace in nearby Shamokin for one of his older brothers. After Gowen became president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and an independent colliery was named in his honor in 1869, this town began appearing on maps as Gowen City. Few of the lots optimistically laid out for residences, churches, and schools were actually sold, and today Gowen City is just a crossroads near a single street of pleasant and prosperous-looking homes overlooking a wide, cultivated valley.
Model Railroading in the Region
The American Legion Memorial Building in downtown Shamokin is so large that it once housed an entire department store on its ground floor, but the store closed and the building passed into the city’s hands. What had been the American Legion’s social room, kitchen, and meeting room on the building’s second floor eventually became home to the three-thousand-square-foot HO-scale “Shamokin Valley Lines” model railroad of the Lower Anthracite Model Railroad Club.
The vast miniature world of the Lower Anthracite Model Railroad Club occupies what was once part of the old American Legion Memorial Building in Shamokin.
The club was founded in 1978 by fourteen hobbyists who displayed a model layout in a bank lobby around Christmas. Before moving to the American Legion Memorial Building, they relocated to a floor over a hobby shop. The reproductions they constructed of recognizable landmark buildings were so popular that their mission became the preservation in miniature of Northumberland County’s disappearing railroad heritage. Their layout depicts the former operations of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Reading, and the Lehigh Valley in this area. Folks of a certain age are amazed to witness the Shamokin, Mount Carmel, Locust Summit, and Sunbury of their youth. The layout is open to the public on Memorial Day weekend in conjunction with Shamokin’s celebration of its Anthracite Heritage Festival. The club also hosts an open house around Christmas, which draws thousands of visitors.
The Milton Model Train Museum has a large O-gauge layout depicting Milton in the 1950s and 1960s. The layout was donated by a single collector and is currently supervised by a group of local hobbyists. Located in the Milton Moose Family Center, the museum is open to visitors during open houses in the spring, fall, and around Christmas.
Named for a branch of the Reading, and depicting scenes along this line, the Schuylkill & Lehigh Model Railroad Club operates in an old passenger car built for the Atlantic City Railroad in 1889. Located in Kempton behind the passenger station of the Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Railroad, it is open on Sundays when the WK&S is running passenger excursions.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 16