The earliest trains operating on this right-of-way were those of the Tioga Railroad, linking Blossburg with New York’s Chemung Canal, a venture later renamed the Blossburg & Corning Railroad, as Erastus Corning was one of its early promoters. In 1873, the Blossburg & Corning Railroad merged with the Wellsboro & Lawrenceville Railroad, which had been completed the previous year. The new entity was called the Corning, Cowanesque & Antrim Railway, much of it owned by the Fall Brook Coal Company, founded by John Magee and his son Duncan, who had discovered coal on Fall Brook Creek. The Corning, Cowanesque & Antrim Railway officially joined the Fall Brook Railway in 1892 and in due course was absorbed into the New York Central system.
A freight train arrives at the site that the Wellsboro & Corning Railroad shares with the Tioga Central Railroad.
The line later moved from the New York Central system into Conrail, which abandoned it south of Wellsboro. Here it had once run through Pine Creek Gorge, also called the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” In 1992, it was purchased by Growth Resources of Wellsboro, an industrial development corporation, to prevent further abandonment and preserve rail service for a factory in town. The following year, WCOR began operations under the management of the same man who operated the North Shore Railroad system of SEDACOG.
In 2008, the Myles Group, an organization of manufacturing and service companies in Exton, purchased WCOR. A. T. “Tom” Myles, scion of a railroad family, thought he was going to continue serving Wellsboro manufacturers and perhaps haul lumber. Town officials in Wellsboro preferred Myles to other potential operators because he had agreed to continue to run the Tioga Central Railroad, a tourist railroad that shared WCOR tracks and was also considered important to the local economy. That was right before Pennsylvania’s shale gas “gold rush.”
WCOR is now one of thirteen northeastern short lines working in partnership with Norfolk Southern and its rail transportation strategy called the Empire Link, a twenty-four-hundred-mile network serving markets in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In 2012 the Myles Group sold a 70 percent interest in the railroad to RailAmerica Inc.
The Region’s Rail Stories
The Philadelphia & Erie Railroad
From the mid-1830s, another idea stirring the imagination of certain Philadelphia entrepreneurs was the possibility of connecting Philadelphia via rail with Erie. Promoters reasoned that such a route running diagonally across the Commonwealth would be the most convenient link between a Great Lakes port and an East Coast metropolis and could not fail to pull a great deal of Midwest trade in Philadelphia’s direction. But standing in the way were miles of uncleared, undeveloped wilderness between Sunbury and Erie, not to mention the mountains, which would rob the proposed railroad of much efficiency if it had to negotiate them with inclined planes.
As early as 1834, newspaper accounts proposed routes roughly following the west branch of the Susquehanna toward Erie. In 1836, the citizens of Warren County petitioned the Commonwealth for just such a railroad in the hope that it would run through their county seat. Businessmen in Erie also favored the plan. The following year, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized the incorporation of the Sunbury & Erie Railroad Company. At the time, Sunbury was already a hub of transportation, conveniently located at the junction of the Susquehanna River’s northern and western branches. And keeping “Philadelphia” out of the railroad’s name also meant that technically the project would not be competing with the Commonwealth’s State Works.
Edward Miller conducted a survey of the terrain in north-central and northwestern Pennsylvania, and in 1839, he recommended that a railroad be built from Erie to Lock Haven, where goods could be transported to the State Works canal on the west branch of the Susquehanna. Construction began the following year, when a short portion of the route west of Warren was graded.
Unfortunately, that was all the work completed on this railroad for about a dozen years. In his history of the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad, Homer Tope Rosenberger writes, “The Sunbury and Erie Railroad Company was sleeping during the 1840s.” Pennsylvania was suffering economically in the wake of the Panic of 1837 and the failure of the Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States. In 1844, the railroad lost a key promoter with the death of Nicholas Biddle, who had also been president of the bank. In the same decade, some of the demand for the Philadelphia-to-Erie connection was addressed by the official incorporation of the Pennsylvania Railroad and its plans for an all-rail line to Pittsburgh, with a projected branch to Erie.
Businessmen in Warren and Erie kept the project alive, and in 1853, after the route was resurveyed, construction began between Milton and Williamsport. It is likely that the rails were manufactured by the Montour Iron Company in nearby Danville. In 1855, tracks were constructed between Milton and Sunbury, where the railroad touched the remains of the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road, as well as the Baltimore & Susquehanna Rail Road, which had since become the Northern Central Railway.
The railroad’s more local promoters, Thomas Struthers and Gen. Thomas L. Kane, caused the original route over the mountains to be abandoned and a new one to be adopted—a poor decision that prevented this railroad from ever achieving its potential. The new route climbed two summits that could be negotiated only by lighter trains, which increased the cost of operations. It also lay too far north of rich bituminous coal deposits and well-timbered land.
The Sunbury & Erie Railroad officially became the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad in 1861 and was leased by the Pennsylvania Railroad the following year, making it one of the first of the Pennsy’s many acquisitions. In 1864, the final portion of this railroad was completed, and it finally became possible for trains to run from Philadelphia to Erie in two days.
That same decade, the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad fostered the development of its own little railroad town at Renovo, where the Susquehanna River runs through a scenic, narrow valley in the mountains of Clinton County. Here the railroad’s locomotives were maintained and workers resided. In 1869, construction of the Renovo House, a large hotel attached to the train station, made the remote town something of a resort. Philadelphia and Its Environs: The Railroad Scenery of Pennsylvania, a travel book published in 1875, calls it “a resort just suited to the hunter and fisher.”
Due to the early delays in construction and the change in the planned route, the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad never did make Erie a major port on the Great Lakes or capture much Midwest trade for Philadelphia. According to Rosenberger, it did, however, open much virtually uninhabited wilderness in north-central and northwestern Pennsylvania to economic development and the lumber industry, and it served as a connecting railroad for other lines.
Logging Railroads
Those hiking in the forests of north-central Pennsylvania are likely to use old railroad grades, where it is not unusual to find the occasional discarded spike or some other rusted fragment of the logging railroads that once hauled felled trees to the area’s sawmills and transformed Pennsylvania’s early lumber industry into big business. The fascinating story of the Commonwealth’s logging railroads was researched and told in great detail in a fourteen-volume series collectively titled The Logging Railroad Era of Lumbering in Pennsylvania, by Walter C. Casler, Benjamin F. G. Kline Jr., and Thomas T. Taber III.
A natural feature called Pulpit Rocks, alongside the line between Keating and Driftwood in the forests of present-day Clinton and Cameron Counties. This illustration from William B. Sipes’s book on the Pennsylvania Railroad shows evidence of active logging.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, lumber was processed in the forests of Pennsylvania in small family-operated mills powered by water. Williamsport became America’s lumber capital, the place where logs were transported by the current of the Susquehanna River and its tributary streams, which drained thousands of square miles of pine and hemlock forests.
Increasing demand for lumber after the Civil War meant that more timber had to be cut and more lumber had to reach potential markets more quickly and
reliably. Adapting railroads to the lumber industry eliminated the need to clear streams and build dams and booms, also making it possible to transport lumber in all seasons of the year. By the 1880s, thousands of miles of logging railroads had been constructed, particularly in Warren, Forest, McKean, Elk, and Potter Counties.
The logging industry was also in action in this illustration of the town of Warren for William B. Sipes’s book.
A locomotive adapted for the logging industry. RAILROAD MUSEUM OF PENNSYLVANIA
According to Casler, Kline, and Taber, Pennsylvania’s first logging railroad was built in Jefferson County in 1864 by a logging operation called Wright and Pier. The manager decided to transform his horsepower-operated, wooden-railed “tramroad” into a genuine railroad operated by locomotive. He and a millwright traveled to Pittsburgh, where they purchased a boiler and steam engine. The millwright then designed and built a locomotive with the help of an eighteen-year-old engineer.
Other lumbermen were soon building their own homegrown locomotives, buying needed parts separately or having them made to order at a local foundry or blacksmith shop. The motley results were called “dinkey” locomotives, regardless of their size, and the old tram roads became known as “dinkey tram roads.” Eventually a number of manufacturers produced locomotives for this growing industry, which was also expanded by the invention of the log loader to place timber on railroad cars. Logging locomotives called the Climax and Heisler were manufactured in Pennsylvania. The Shay, which became the most popular nationwide, was built in neighboring Ohio.
The precious locomotives were generally used only to take empty cars to a place where lumber was being cut. The locomotives then returned alone, while the railroad cars loaded with lumber employed the force of gravity controlled by a single brakeman to get the logs to the mill. This thrilling and often hazardous process became known as “wildcatting.”
Logging railroads generally had a main line fed by many spurs that were constantly extended to new timber-cutting areas. Narrow-gauge railroads were best adapted to the steep grades and sharp curves required by the region’s rugged terrain. Casler et al. write, “The logging railroad operated in all kinds of weather and could go anywhere. It followed the winding course of streams, switchbacked up steep hillsides and crossed over into the next hollow seeking more timber. It went into swamps, and laid its track along the soft, marshy ground in places often covered with two feet of water.” A history of Clarion County by Aaron J. Davis, published in 1887, illustrates how completely logging railroads had transformed the industry in a very short time. Davis reports, “The River is no longer the great highway for traffic … all the larger firms have sidings and ship their products by the more convenient and always available rail, sending only empty coal boats by water.”
In Forest and southern Warren Counties, the Wheeler and Dusenbury Lumber Company operated sawmills at Newtown and Endeavor from 1837 to 1939. Their mills, farms, and lumber camps were linked by some 50 miles of logging railroads. The Goodyear Lumber Company, with mills in Galeton and Austin, operated 120 miles of logging railroad served by twenty locomotives between 1878 and 1920.
Truman Dowd (“Teddy”) Collins was Pennsylvania’s best-known lumberman. Born in 1831, he established nine sawmills in the course of his life. He lived in north-central Pennsylvania, where his business was located, rather than in some distant city. He built the Sheffield & Tionesta Railroad, which was incorporated as a common carrier in 1900. It followed the path of Tionesta Creek, and after its abandonment in 1943, its grade was much appreciated by fishermen.
The Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company was formed as a subsidiary of the United States Lumber Company in 1903. One of the largest lumbering operations in the Commonwealth, it was headquartered in Williamsport and operated sixteen mills. In the early years of the twentieth century, this firm cut half of Pennsylvania’s lumber. When its Sheffield mill closed in the early 1940s, the Commonwealth’s lumbering era was essentially over.
Once a lumbering firm was through with a particular piece of real estate, the trees were often completely gone. Writing in 1887, Davis speculates, “It requires no degree of foresight to see … that seven years hence Clarion County shall be completely stripped of its pine and oak timber of value.” The pitifully denuded tracts were considered worthless by lumber companies and sold back to the Commonwealth at bargain prices. After many years of care and conservation, however, they have proven to be a great investment. Today they comprise much of the Allegheny National Forest, established in 1923, as well as many of Pennsylvania’s state parks, where hikers now encounter a landscape that looks more like it did during Thomas Jefferson’s administration than at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Unfolding Tale of Marcellus Shale
Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale tale actually started in Houston, Texas, in the 1980s, when a businessman in the natural gas industry named George P. Mitchell realized his reserves were running low. After more than a decade of experimentation, he came up with a refined version of existing technology called hydraulic fracturing. In 2002, Mitchell merged his company with another that had expertise in horizontal drilling. The combination of these two techniques made it possible to release natural gas trapped in shale formations. Water, sand, and chemicals could be pumped under high pressure to great depths through wells into shale formations, creating fissures kept open by sand through which gas could flow to the well.
The Marcellus Shale formation runs diagonally from the Commonwealth’s southwestern corner to its northeastern one, also extending into West Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Geologists estimate its recoverable gas as one of the largest reserves in the nation. And more or less beneath the Marcellus Shale lie the Utica Shale and Upper Devonian Shale, in perfect position for investors to take advantage of the same infrastructure and transform the Commonwealth’s economy in a way perhaps not seen since the discovery of coal.
In 2009, about two dozen shale gas drill rigs were operating in Pennsylvania; by the spring of 2011, there were more than twenty-seven hundred wells. Most of them are located in relatively rural Susquehanna, Bradford, Tioga, Washington, and Green Counties. The wells are not cheap; larger ones cost $4 million to $6 million. However, the profit potential is worth the price.
Railroads have been one of the beneficiaries in Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom. The executives of three Pennsylvania Class I railroads—Norfolk Southern, CSX, and Canadian Pacific—have used words like dramatic, startling, and explosive to describe the growth they’ve experienced from the emerging shale gas industry. The results have been just as lucrative for the eighteen Pennsylvania short lines currently supporting the industry, often working in partnership with the larger Class I firms. Trains can haul the materials necessary for drilling, including pipe, water, drill rig parts, chemicals, and rock, but their most important freight is the crucial “frack sand,” which often comes from mines in the Midwest. Trains also haul wastewater and debris away from drilling sites. In order to accommodate these demands, railroads have purchased large numbers of covered hopper cars called sand cars, upgraded their tracks, and increased locomotive fleets. Since the industry requires unloading, storage, and distribution facilities, railroads have worked quickly to reopen yards and sidings that had previously stood idle, or build new ones convenient to locations where future drilling is anticipated. Pennsylvania railroads regard the shale gas industry as a long-term sustainable market; scientists estimate that the Marcellus Shale formation could support gas extraction for at least the next thirty years.
Unstoppable Hollywood in the Wilds
For a few weeks in 2010, the region became the scene of big-budget film production. Starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as a veteran engineer and rookie conductor, the movie, called Unstoppable, was about a train loaded with hazardous chemicals that manages to escape a rail yard unmanned. As the train picks up speed, it portends disaster, becoming, as one character puts it, not just a runaway train, but a missile the size o
f the Chrysler Building.
Heroic efforts are made to stop it, culminating with the film’s stars using another locomotive to chase it down. Their plan, according to Washington’s character, is to “grab it by the tail and gun it in the opposite direction,” an effort that almost works. They finally achieve success through the time-honored Hollywood stunt tradition of leaping from one moving vehicle to another to reach the locomotive.
Production was headquartered in Pittsburgh, and many scenes, set on the fictional Allegheny and West Virginia Railroad, were shot along the Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad during daylight hours while the real rail traffic ran at night. Pennsylvania towns where filming occurred included Emporium, Milesburg, Tyrone, Bradford, and Unionville. Route 220, which runs parallel to the tracks, was convenient for cameras mounted on vehicles. Many locals served as extras, playing citizens in crowd scenes or those fleeing danger.
The film was released in 2010 to generally favorable reviews. As it lives on in DVD, it will no doubt provide residents of the region added entertainment through the challenge of spotting their neighbors and local landmarks in a fast-paced action movie.
Arch Bristow Travels Back in Time
In 2010, the Warren County Historical Society announced that it had available for sale a new reprint of a book titled Old Time Tales of Warren County, originally published in the 1930s. Its author, Arch Bristow, was a resident of the Warren County town of Garland. He traveled throughout the county, making it his business to interview old-timers about the Warren County of their youth and what they could recall about its pioneers, early settlements, and industries, including the lumbering industry.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 18