The Tioga Central Railroad
Route 15 connects Williamsport with Route 6, the four-hundred-mile highway linking all the seats of Pennsylvania’s northern tier of counties. In this region, Route 6 winds its way among forested hills, across swift streams, and through prime game lands. It brings vacationers to cabins and rustic motels, and customers to the parking lots of beloved local watering holes, like the Antlers Inn. Route 6 also more or less connects the artifacts of this region’s railroad history.
The excursion train arrives at the Tioga Central Railroad.
The highway bisects the town of Wellsboro, which has a still-thriving Main Street. Wellsboro also has a Victorian courthouse next door to a somber redbrick Victorian jail and across the street from a town square with a fountain. One of the square’s monuments is decorated with bas-reliefs depicting a steam engine and coal car and is dedicated to John Magee, a founder of the Fall Brook Railway.
Three miles north of Wellsboro lies a place called Wellsboro Junction, a junction no more, as it is no longer a place where the lines of different railroads converge. Besides the freight trains of the Wellsboro & Corning Railroad, the tracks located here are used by the Tioga Central Railroad, whose excursion trains have been making passenger runs since 1994 to a spot south of Corning, New York.
Tioga Central’s diesel locomotives haul some nicely refurbished passenger cars, including the 1939 Budd car, now furnished for dining with tables and chairs; an ex-Canadian National coach; and another Canadian National veteran built in 1920 as an open-platform observation car, which now houses a snack bar and lounge area. Possibly the most interesting Tioga Central car is one they call the Crooked Creek, which includes a stainless steel kitchen where meals are prepared for the Tioga Central dinner trains that operate on weekends serving lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch. On Fridays, there’s an Ice Cream Express featuring dessert. And for those who like to start the weekend early, the Tioga Central offers a Happy Hour Express on occasional Thursdays.
The trips take passengers north to Hammond Lake on the portion of the railroad built in 1872 to haul coal out of Antrim. Nineteenthcentury passengers on the same line would not have enjoyed a view of Hammond Lake, which was built as part of a Susquehanna River flood control project in the wake of Hurricane Agnes, which wreaked havoc in Pennsylvania in 1972.
Tables are set for a dinner train on the Tioga Central Railroad.
Sitting stationary at Wellsboro Junction is the Tioga Central’s oldest piece of equipment: Car 54, originally built in 1894 as a double-ended open platform paymaster car and now serving as a gift shop. Its platform draped with bunting is popular for those who want to take photographs of friends and relatives waving as though on a whistle-stop campaign tour. Since the population of Tioga County is now growing, it is possible that Wellsboro Junction will also see some expansion, perhaps with a real passenger station or even a tourist village.
The Pennsylvania Lumber Museum
Farther west on Route 6, past the town of Galeton, once known for its busy sawmills, there’s a place to sample the life of a “wood hick,” or logger, at the recreated logging camp at the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum, administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on 160 timbered acres in Potter County. Local men who once worked or still work in the lumber industry take visitors there the same way that Philadelphia suburbanites take their out-of-town guests to Valley Forge.
On the edge of a mill pond where logs are floating, the logging camp has an operating sawmill, its floor littered with sawdust from recent demonstrations. The camp also has a reconstructed blacksmith shop, horse barn, and filer’s shack, where loggers would have had their tools sharpened. Tables are set in the mess hall, and the kitchen is furnished with cans of pork and beans. All the buildings are constructed of rough-hewn, weathered boards in a way that would make demolition easy when it was time to move on.
Although the typical logging camp would not have had the luxury of an engine house, the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum built one to protect its star exhibit and artifact of logging railroads: a Shay locomotive. Named for its inventor, Ephraim Shay, the Shay locomotive was gear driven, thus making it—like the Climax and Heisler—slow but powerful, to enable it to operate on steep grades and rails hastily laid on rugged and uneven terrain. This particular Shay, used by several lumber companies in West Virginia, was donated by the Penn-York Lumberman’s Club.
Residents of this region have a special respect for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), thanks to its role in cleaning up after the logging industry. Created in 1933 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, the CCC enrolled young men for conservation projects nationwide, including road construction, tree planting, and drainage facilitation. The men lived a military life in camps run by the army and sent most of their pay home to their families. The Pennsylvania Lumber Museum has a genuine 1930s CCC cabin on its grounds. It is one of many memorials that can be found in this region to the men who were responsible for the dams, campsites, and other amenities still used by visitors today.
Kinzua Viaduct
Near the town of Mount Jewett stand the remains of one of Pennsylvania’s most impressive railroad artifacts: Kinzua (pronounced Kin-zoo) Bridge, or Viaduct, built to transport coal from land owned by the New York & Erie Railroad in Elk and Jefferson Counties to Buffalo, New York, where there was a ready market for about three million tons of coal per year, as well as excellent facilities for transshipment to the Midwest. As the bird flies, Buffalo was not so far away, so the Erie’s local subsidiary, the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad & Coal Company, managed to build a structure that enabled trains to “soar” over the valley of Kinzua Creek.
Because the Kinzua Creek flowed through a gorge that was three hundred feet deep and half a mile wide, the railroad had three choices: from the Erie’s main line station at Carrolton, New York, it could lay tracks that detoured around the valley; descended into the valley, where they would cross a bridge; or spanned the entire valley on one enormous viaduct. Gen. Thomas L. Kane promoted the third and boldest choice, and specifications for Kinzua Viaduct were drawn up by the Erie’s chief engineer, Octave Chanute. Another member of the self-taught generation of railroad engineers, Chanute had already built bridges across the Missouri River, as well as the elevated railway system in New York City. A firm called Clarke, Reeves & Company of Phoenixville was tapped to fabricate it.
The resulting viaduct was 301 feet high and 2,051 feet long, about 50 feet higher than the structure in the Peruvian Andes that had previously held the record as the world’s highest railroad viaduct. Constructed of iron, its twenty spans were supported by towers built on stone foundations. Kinzua Viaduct also gained the nation’s respect for having been built in less than four months after its foundations were prepared. It was completed in September 1882.
The Kinzua Viaduct at Kinzua Bridge State Park in 2001. PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION AND NATURAL RESOURCES
The bridge immediately became a tourist attraction, and its first bridge tender, Charles Stauffer, became a local daredevil hero who could often be observed climbing the massive structure. In his 1890 history of McKean County, M. A. Leeson writes about Stauffer’s exploits: “The first watchman used to inspect three of the twenty towers each day. In the winter of 1883–84, while engaged in his work, the air benumbed his hands, so that he could not cling longer to the braces, and losing his grip, fell sixty-five feet into a deep snowdrift, which saved him. On another occasion someone hailed him from the track, and, forgetting his location, he let go his hold and was falling from the top girts, when a friendly iron brace, within reach, saved his life.”
In 1893, a bank robber dying of pneumonia raved in his delirium about $40,000 in gold coin and currency that he had stashed in glass jars buried somewhere near the viaduct. Fortune hunters have searched for the loot for more than a century, but no one has ever reported finding it. The rangers at today’s Kinzua Bridge State Park prefer that visitors do not arriv
e bearing shovels.
In less than two decades, newer and heavier rolling stock meant that Kinzua Viaduct would need to be replaced. The Elmira Bridge Company constructed a new steel viaduct using the same foundation. Once again, the project was executed as quickly as possible. Demolition of the old viaduct began in May 1900, and trains were running across the new viaduct by the end of that September.
In 1959, Kinzua Viaduct was closed because of declining freight traffic. When the Erie Lackawanna Railroad sold it to a salvager, local citizens lobbied to preserve it as a railroad artifact and tourist attraction. Elisha Kent Kane, grandson of Gen. Thomas L. Kane, was one of the movement’s leaders. Kinzua Bridge State Park was created in 1963, and Kinzua Viaduct was placed on the National Register of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks in 1982.
On July 21, 2003, the National Weather Service reported that at least three tornadoes had rampaged through western Pennsylvania, with winds estimated at seventy to a hundred miles per hour. Houses and barns were leveled, roofs were ripped from buildings, and trees by the hundreds were uprooted or snapped in two. At Kinzua Bridge State Park, a tornado struck Kinzua Viaduct from the side, tearing eleven towers from their concrete bases and hurling them to the floor of the gorge.
Ironically, just about a year earlier, Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources had the bridge inspected by engineers, who had concluded that strong wind hitting the bridge could shift its center of gravity and take it down. In February 2003, repairs had been initiated to stabilize it. The workers fled as the tornado raged up the valley, and luckily no one was injured.
We last visited on a Sunday in 2011 while Hurricane Irene was blasting New York City and northern New Jersey. It was cloudy and cool in Mount Jewett, which experienced wind but no rain. When we arrived at 9:30 a.m., there were already three cars in the parking lot and several rail fans out on the bridge. The area had been newly landscaped and what was left of the bridge had been converted into an observation deck where one could walk out and view the valley below, not to mention what was left of the bridge.
Remains of the Kinzua Viaduct following its partial destruction in 2003.
Having visited the Kinzua Bridge before, and therefore knowing that it tended to sway in the breeze, we hesitated at the edge and paused to take pictures. A pair of rail fans who arrived just then laughed and asked us, “What? You’re not going out to the edge?” Sorry guys, not today. There’s a hurricane just a little too close for comfort.
Kane
Signs welcoming visitors to Kane proclaim this town to be “The Black Cherry Capital of the World.” That’s black cherry as in hardwood, not fruit. Kane is almost surrounded by the Allegheny National Forest. Sometimes Kane is also called the “Icebox of Pennsylvania” because of the extraordinary amount of snowfall it receives.
Kane’s naturally low pollen count and cool summer breezes made it a popular resort during the late nineteenth century. At one time, it had its own railroad hotel, the Thomson House, named after J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Today visitors can stop at the restored PRR train station to see railroad memorabilia and the works of local artists on display.
Kane’s other attraction is the Thomas L. Kane Memorial Chapel and Museum, built by the general between 1876 and 1878 to serve as the town’s First Presbyterian Church. Now the chapel is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and functions as a satellite of its world-famous Family History Library. Visitors interested in railroad heritage can admire the statue of Gen. Thomas L. Kane outside the chapel.
The restored PRR train station in Kane.
Lorett Treese Travels
In the decade since we last visited Wellsboro, some things had changed, others had not. Thanks to the business spurred by Marcellus Shale development, there were a lot of trucks on Route 6—a whole lot of trucks. A guy we met in a bar later that day told us the increased traffic made his daily commute to work much longer than it had been just two years earlier.
Wellsboro was the same pretty, classic, all-American town with its gaslit Main Street. The old Wellsboro Diner was still there. So was a new Dunkin’ Donuts and a gourmet hand-tossed pizza place. The Penn Wells Hotel was still there, looking much the same as we remembered it. The building was originally constructed in 1869 but extensively renovated by new owners and reopened in 1926. Its lobby with tile floor and fireplace flanked by traditional furnishings was still cozy and inviting. The lounge was still decorated in Ye Olde English, and the Mary Wells Dining Room still served a great homemade soup and prime rib special. Our room had been recently repainted in soothing pastels and newly furnished, but the bathroom still boasted its 1920s sink and tile walls, which included one tile with a vertical slit for disposal of the kind of razor blades gentlemen used to screw into their safety razors.
What was new about the place was all the guys in the lobby and lounge wearing coveralls and work boots. The fellow we chatted with at the bar told us that shale gas workers from out of state sometimes rented hotel rooms by the month and essentially lived at the hotel. Just down the street, the hotel’s sister establishment, the Penn Wells Lodge, was being expanded with forty new rooms and a fitness center.
We arrived at the ticket office and rail yard of the Tioga Central Railroad just as the yellow and orange locomotive of a Wellsboro & Corning Railroad (WCOR) freight was pulling in. It passed us on its way to a part of the yard where many other railcars were parked. The drive from the main road into the rail yard was potholed and rutted from the wheels of heavy trucks that hauled out sand. We spotted a new repair facility, other WCOR locomotives, and some cabooses as we purchased our tickets for an afternoon excursion ride.
When our train arrived, we walked through the dining car, which was being set up for a dinner train that would serve barbecued chicken and ribs that evening. The Norris Brook, like other cars on our train, had been named after a feature in the landscape along our route. In other words, there was a Norris Brook over which we would pass. The dining car and the two passenger cars behind it were among the most neatly restored of any excursion cars we have ridden in Pennsylvania.
The author pretends she’s on a whistle stop tour at the Tioga Central Railroad.
The snack bar car served beer, but we decided to begin our trip in the open-air observation car called the Ives Run, also named for a body of water we would cross. As our ride began, we noticed that the transition from industrial surroundings to natural ones filled with wildlife was almost immediate. The Tioga Central claims to be one of the Commonwealth’s most scenic rides, which is likely true. The train passes through an area where wetlands are being restored. In late August, we saw flowers of soft lavender shades among foliage ranging from yellow green to blue green, reminding us of landscapes by Monet. Flocks of birds rose from the marshes as the train approached, and we spotted a heron gazing intently at the water from its perch on a piece of driftwood. At one point, we passed through forest with a canopy high above us; at another, we were looking down on the tops of trees.
Passengers enjoying the open-air car on the Tioga Central Railroad.
As we approached Hammond Lake, we could see the structures and small marina of the Ives Run Recreational Area across the water. Here the train stopped. The Tioga Central operates its excursion trains with locomotives at both ends, so passengers get a chance to observe the kayaks and motorboats on the lake while the engineer and brakeman shut down one locomotive and walk the length of the train to start up the other one.
During the ride out, many passengers, especially those with children, had gravitated to the open-air car. For the ride back, we moved to one of the other passenger cars and enjoyed its relatively smooth, quiet, air-conditioned ride in a car we had almost to ourselves.
The Region’s Rail-Trails
What may be Pennsylvania’s best rail-trail extends along the floor of the Pine Creek Gorge, where cool Pine Creek flows between forested walls that are home to eagles, herons, hawks, and even coy
otes. Now part of the Tioga State Forest, this dramatic gorge is also known as the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” Formed about twenty thousand years ago, when retreating glaciers created a dam that forced Pine Creek to reverse its course and flow south, this gorge is forty-seven miles long and 1,450 feet deep at its southern and deepest end.
The Pine Creek Gorge gained railroad tracks in 1883, when the Jersey Shore, Pine Creek & Buffalo Railroad was constructed to transport timber, coal, and passengers between Wellsboro Junction and Williamsport. This railroad entered the Fall Brook system when it was reorganized in 1892, and it later became part of the New York Central and then the Penn Central systems. Conrail ran its last freight train through the canyon in 1988.
This fifty-seven-mile-plus trail runs from Ansonia to Jersey Shore. Visitors can access the trail at a point off Route 6 for hiking, nonmotorized biking, or cross-country skiing. There are many other access points in the Tioga State Forest and the Tiadaghton State Forest.
Pine Creek Gorge is framed by two state parks, located on its eastern and western rims. Leonard Harrison State Park, on the eastern rim, was named after the Wellsboro businessman who developed this immediate area as a public picnic ground called “The Lookout.” Work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps to further develop the park is honored by a lifesize statue of a CCC recruit poised at the summit. Colton Point State Park, on the western rim, was created on land purchased by the Commonwealth in the early 1900s and developed by the CCC. It is named after local lumberman Henry Colton.
A family enjoys the Pine Creek Trail.
Both state parks have trails descending to the bottom of the gorge, but most visitors just come to stroll along the summit and admire the view. Local residents have been known to arrive in limousines to have their wedding photographs taken. The changing colors of the leaves make the view particularly spectacular in autumn, but the crushed stone path of Pine Creek Trail, visible along the stream, provides an impressive vista all year long. The sight of hikers and bikers moving some eight hundred feet below, where steam locomotives once ran, gives the visitor a real respect for the scale of Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 20