Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  The North Country Trail is America’s longest national scenic trail, stretching from New York to North Dakota. It enters Pennsylvania at the New York border west of Bradford and crosses the Allegheny National Forest and Cook Forest State Park, finally exiting Pennsylvania at Beaver Falls.

  Among the other rail-trails in this region are the Sentiero di Shay, Bellefonte Central Trail, Snow Shoe Trail, Armstrong Trail, Clarion Highlands Trail, Houtzdale Line Trail, Beaver Meadow Trail, Wolf Run Rail Trail, Blaisdell-Emery Trail, Mahoning Shadow Trail, Lycoming Creek Bikeway, and Susquehannock Trail System, plus the trails of the Allegheny National Forest.

  SECTION FIVE

  Upstate Pennsylvania

  Great and Growing Railways of the Region

  The Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Erie Lackawanna

  The New York & Erie Railroad (NY&E) was chartered in 1832 in response to the demands of New York’s southern counties for a transportation system to serve their needs and compete with the Erie Canal. Although financial and construction problems delayed its completion for twenty years, opening day on May 14, 1851, was an important event; dignitaries such as Daniel Webster and Millard Fillmore, the president of the United States, were aboard two trains making their maiden voyages.

  The merger of this railroad with another line through Pennsylvania commonly called the Lackawanna was still many years away, but the New York & Erie was already a Pennsylvania railroad in a manner of speaking. Benjamin Wright, an engineer who had worked on both the Erie Canal and the Delaware & Hudson Canal, had mapped a route that took the Erie’s tracks into the Commonwealth above Port Jervis, where they ran north along the western shore of the Delaware River to Deposit, a town in New York. From Deposit, the NY&E ran west to the north branch of the Susquehanna River and entered Pennsylvania a second time, above Lanesboro, where the line followed the Susquehanna’s “Great Bend” on its way to Binghamton, New York. For the privilege of operating in its jurisdiction, the Commonwealth charged the railroad $10,000 per year.

  During the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the Erie’s managers were faced with the task of correcting a number of ill-conceived features that placed it at a disadvantage when competing with other railroads. For example, its original terminal points, Piermont on the Hudson and Dunkirk on Lake Erie, were obscure villages. Only after the Erie had obtained access to Buffalo and built a terminal on the west shore of the Hudson River opposite New York in the early 1860s did it cease to be the line that ran through sparsely populated countryside between points to nowhere.

  The Erie had also been constructed with rails six feet apart rather than four feet, eight and a half inches, which had become the standard gauge of other railroads. Attempts to promote its wider cars and capacity for bigger loads could not mitigate the fact that the Erie could not interchange its cars with other railroads. In 1880, it abandoned its broad gauge. Around the same time, the Erie completed a subsidiary called the Chicago & Erie Railroad, giving it access to this Midwest city. In the 1920s, it inaugurated the Erie Limited, a new passenger express between New York and Chicago. Although its fares were cheaper than the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited and the Pennsy’s Broadway Limited, Erie trains took about eight hours longer to complete the trip.

  The Lackawanna joined with the Pennsy in making the Poconos accessible for tourism. RAILROAD MUSEUM OF PENNSYLVANIA

  The Erie’s poor financial situation dated from the “Erie Wars” of the 1860s, when it acquired the nickname of the “Scarlet Woman of Wall Street.” The story is related by John Steele Gordon in his book by the same name. Having failed to get the Erie to cooperate with the New York Central, Cornelius Vanderbilt set out to gain control of it by buying stock. The three men who controlled the Erie, Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and James Fisk, did their best to oblige him by manufacturing thousands of worthless shares and dumping them on the market. “It learned me never to kick a skunk,” Vanderbilt is widely reported to have commented.

  Having already suffered two bankruptcies in 1875 and 1893, the Erie endured yet another one in 1938, brought on by the Depression. This series of events only enhanced its reputation as the “weary Erie.”

  The other half of this railroad system was born in the mind of Henry Drinker, a Quaker who purchased a great deal of land in the Lackawanna Valley, which was known for its deposits of anthracite coal. Drinker built the region’s first turnpike, the “Old Drinker Road,” in 1819. According to Emily C. Blackman’s History of Susquehanna County, in order to satisfy himself that a railroad was possible, “Drinker blazed with an axe a route from the mouth of the Lackawanna, now Pittston, through the unbroken forest, across the lofty Pocono Mountains to the Water Gap, a distance of sixty miles.” By 1826, he obtained a charter for the Susquehanna & Delaware Canal & Rail Road, but because of the lack of efficient transportation from the Delaware Water Gap to either Philadelphia or New York at that early date, he was unable to attract sufficient investors.

  Drinker tried again after the citizens of Carbondale, hoping to build a railroad from the coalfields north to Oswego and the canals of New York, obtained a charter for the Ligetts’ Gap Rail Road in 1832. The Ligetts’ Gap plus the Susquehanna & Delaware would have formed a system stretching from the Delaware Water Gap through the Lackawanna Valley to the New York State line, but the financial climate of the late 1830s again spooked potential investors.

  From the early 1840s, the Scranton family had been attempting to exploit the area’s iron ore and coal deposits with an iron foundry, but their remote location meant that their products had to be shipped by wagon to Pittston and then by canal to Havre de Grace, Maryland. The Scrantons’ business was not only saved but greatly expanded by a timely contract for T rails for the nearby Delaware division of the New York & Erie Railroad. In 1847, the Scrantons purchased the old Ligetts’ Gap charter, and thanks to their influence, that same year a second company was chartered to build a railroad from the Delaware Water Gap to Cobb’s Gap on the Lackawanna: the Delaware & Cobb’s Gap Railroad Company. It was merged in 1853 with the old Ligetts’ Gap line, which had been renamed the Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The new entity, with George Scranton as its first president, was called the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DL&W), or in later years, simply the Lackawanna.

  The DL&W rapidly began expanding its reach both east and west. In 1868, to obtain access to New York City, DL&W took a perpetual lease on the Morris & Essex Railroad, which ran across northern New Jersey to Hoboken. In 1872, the DL&W began to acquire the Lackawanna & Bloomsburg Railroad, with which it merged the following year. This line, chartered in 1852, ran from Scranton through the Wyoming Valley to Northumberland, where it connected with the Northern Central Railway, which had become part of the Pennsy system. In 1876, the DL&W corrected a problem it shared with the Erie: it abandoned its six-foot gauge and became a standard-gauge railroad. Much planning made it possible to shut down traffic for only forty-eight hours during the switch.

  The DL&W nearly became the eastern division of Jay Gould’s railroad empire, which ran from Buffalo to the Rocky Mountains. Gould began buying its stock, but Moses Taylor, then DL&W’s dominant stockholder and president of New York’s National City Bank, was able to outbid him. Gould was also involved in establishing the New York, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, chartered in 1880 to run from Buffalo to Binghamton. The DL&W leased this line in 1882, making the DL&W a through line from New York to Buffalo. Just after the turn of the century, one of the DL&W’s locomotives became famous as the train appearing in the landmark 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, which was shot along its tracks. One of the railroad’s engineers made a cameo appearance.

  According to Thomas Townsend Taber and Thomas Townsend Taber III in their 1980 book on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, “The ‘Twentieth Century’ really arrived on the Lackawanna on March 2, 1899 when William Haynes Truesdale assumed the presidency, succeeding the venerable Sam Sloan, who had presided over the destinies of the
railroad for thirty one years since 1868. Mr. Truesdale had previously been Vice President and General Manager of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad and before that President of the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad.” In a report issued that year, Truesdale stated his objective of increasing the earning power of the DL&W through rigid economy and physical improvements.

  In a move that seemed logical and cost-effective when it took place, in 1960, the DL&W, after seeking a merger with the Nickel Plate Road, merged with the Erie, creating the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad (the hyphen was later dropped). Given that the DL&W offered better and faster service, as well as the Erie’s long history of bankruptcies, DL&W executives might have expected to dominate the new railroad, but this was not the case. In Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad 1938–1992, H. Roger Grant points out, “The emblem that fireman Truman Knight designed for the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad did more than cleverly incorporate the initials of its corporate name. As a modification of the seven-decade-old Erie diamond herald, Knight’s creation suggested that the carrier was more Erie than Lackawanna. He rightly conveyed the image of an Erie-dominated merger; former Erie officials generally held key positions in the new firm until a sweeping administrative reorganization took place in 1963.”

  The Erie Lackawanna became part of the Norfolk & Western Railway’s Dereco Corporation in 1968 and continued to operate until 1972, when Hurricane Agnes dumped heavy rains on northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. This unprecedented storm washed out portions of roadbed along two hundred miles of the railroad’s main line and caused major damage to many of its bridges. Without funds other than its cash flow, the Erie Lackawanna declared bankruptcy.

  In 1976, most of the Erie Lackawanna became part of Conrail. Properties abandoned by Conrail were sold by trustees to pay taxes and creditors. Today the Erie Lackawanna Historical Society preserves historical information on the railroads that made up the Erie Lackawanna system and its predecessors. The Anthracite Railroads Historical Society in Lansdale also interprets the history of this railroad.

  The Central Railroad of New Jersey

  The Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) was formed in 1849 from two existing railroads: the then bankrupt Elizabethtown & Somerville Railroad and the Somerville & Easton Railroad. The merger was masterminded by John Taylor Johnston, who had become president of the Elizabethtown & Somerville in 1848 at the age of twenty-eight and was president of the CNJ until 1876.

  By 1852, the CNJ was completed to Phillipsburg, on the shore of the Delaware River, and the company purchased its first locomotive, which was called the Pennsylvania. By 1859, the railroad was advertising excursions to Pennsylvania’s coalfields (including the attractions of Mauch Chunk) in conjunction with several Pennsylvania railroads, a project that later gave birth to its regular train service to Buffalo and Chicago via Williamsport.

  In 1871, the CNJ leased the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad from the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. This move made it possible for the CNJ to haul coal from the Commonwealth’s coalfields across New Jersey to its terminal at Jersey City, where the coal was ferried to New York. It also made the CNJ the route by which the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the DL&W reached New York City. The Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad brought the CNJ a series of three inclined planes, which hoisted freight cars over Penobscot Mountain. Completed in the 1840s, the Ashley Planes were leased until 1948, when twentieth-century diesel locomotives were powerful enough to negotiate the regular mountain railroad grades hauling cars filled with coal.

  Starting in 1874, the CNJ began a lengthy and close association with the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, with joint operation of passenger service between Jersey City and Philadelphia. In 1883, Franklin B. Gowen gained control of the CNJ by lease, an agreement that fell apart after the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad went into receivership. Gowen’s successor, A. A. McLeod, leased the CNJ a second time and held it until 1893, the date of the Reading’s second bankruptcy. In 1901, the Reading Company purchased a controlling interest in the CNJ, and the two lines were operated independently but in close cooperation.

  The decline in the use of anthracite coal, coupled with financial problems brought on by the Depression, sent the CNJ into receivership in 1939. In 1944, the railroad adopted a new emblem featuring the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty, probably inspired by wartime patriotism as much as by the fact that so many of its facilities were located in Jersey City in sight of this monument. In the 1950s, the CNJ cut costs but faced a new kind of competition with the opening of the New Jersey Turnpike and Newark Airport. Its final filing for bankruptcy came in 1967. All its operations in Pennsylvania ceased in 1972, and it became part of Conrail in 1976, with the state of New Jersey acquiring its passenger services.

  Those interested in the history of the Central Railroad of New Jersey may soon be able to visit the new New Jersey Transportation Heritage Center planned for Phillipsburg. Other sources of information include the Jersey Central Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society and the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society in Lansdale.

  The Delaware & Hudson

  Thanks to the anthracite deposits they frequently discovered in their travels, William and Maurice Wurts (sometimes spelled Wurtz), two Philadelphia clothing merchants, knew that there were promising coal lands in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley. In 1812, they began acquiring land at good prices in what was then Luzerne County, but by the time they were able to send their first coal shipment to Philadelphia in 1822, they were competing with coal arriving there via the more established Lehigh Canal.

  Deciding that there would be a better market for their coal in either New York City or Albany, they established the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, a project that required authorization from two states. In March 1823, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized Maurice Wurts to improve the Lackawaxen River. That April, the New York legislature permitted the Wurts brothers to build a canal between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers.

  To secure the needed funding, Maurice Wurts made some preliminary surveys and hired Benjamin Wright, chief engineer of the Erie Canal, to map the route for a canal that would stretch more than a hundred miles from the Lackawaxen River along the Delaware to Port Jervis, New York, and thence through the valley of Rondout Creek northeastward to the town of Rondout, near Kingston. Wright’s map, together with samples of the area’s coal shipped from Philadelphia, attracted a sufficient number of New York City investors to finance the canal and build the towns of Carbondale and Honesdale, the latter named after Philip Hone, a mayor of New York City and the first president of the canal company.

  Unfortunately, the coal mines near Carbondale were separated from the canal’s terminus at Honesdale by the ridge of the Moosic Mountain, which was too steep for a canal. Benjamin Wright and his successor, John B. Jervis, engineered a gravity railroad to replace the inefficient wagons and sleds then being used to haul coal. Known simply as the Gravity, this railroad conquered the ridge with five inclined planes operated by stationary steam engines ascending to Rix’s Gap and three planes operated only by gravity descending to Honesdale. The canal and railway system were completed in 1829.

  That same year, the Gravity took its place in history as America’s first operating railroad to employ a locomotive. Horatio Allen, a young civil engineer who had been making surveys for the system, told the story in 1881 to the Honesdale Citizen in an interview that was paraphrased in the 1886 History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, edited by Alfred Mathews. According to Allen, when John B. Jervis discovered that the young engineer was going to England to study the construction and operation of railroads, he asked Allen to purchase iron for the Gravity’s rails, chains for its inclined planes, and three locomotives. Allen ordered one locomotive to be built by Robert Stephenson & Co. and three more from a company located in Stourbridge. In his history of the Delaware & Hudson (D&H), Jim Shaughnessy writes, “A painter in the latter’s [Foster, Rastrick & Co.’s] shop at Stourbr
idge is said to have detected in the rounded boiler head of the little machine a resemblance to the king of beasts and painted a brilliant likeness on the front of the iron monster,” thus acquiring for one of these locomotives its nickname, the “Stourbridge Lion.”

  When the locomotives began arriving in New York, they were exhibited in the city for the purpose of attracting additional investors before being shipped by canal to Honesdale, where Horatio Allen was waiting. According to Allen’s account, on August 8, 1829, a large crowd came to witness the trial run of the Stourbridge Lion, but no one particularly wanted to chance taking a ride on it. Declaring that there was no need to risk any life other than his own, Allen climbed on board and made a three-mile trip to Seelyville and back.

  Many railroad historians have stated that the trial run demonstrated only that the railroad could not support the locomotive’s weight. A passage in the 1886 county history implies that at that date, Allen was busy contradicting claims that his trial run had been a failure: “As the ‘Lion’ passed over [the tracks], the weight pressed everything underneath firmly down to its place on the roadbed, with no little creaking and groaning. Beyond this, however, Mr. Allen saw nothing to indicate that the track was unequal to the requirements of the locomotive. The ‘Lion’ proved to be all that the engineer had expected.”

  In any case, after a second trial run on September 9, the Stourbridge Lion was taken off the tracks and stored in a shed for about twenty years. Then it was moved to Carbondale, where its boiler was adapted for use in an iron shop, while the railroad tracks were consigned to actual horsepower. Another of Allen’s locomotives appears to have been shipped to Rondout or possibly Honesdale, where it was also dismantled. The fate of the other two locomotives remains unknown. It was Allen’s speculation that his locomotives were scrapped because by the time they arrived, the railroad had been executed as a gravity railroad and they were no longer really needed.