Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  One of the Poconos’ most well-known resorts was founded by a president of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. In 1941, Robert V. White broke ground for Split Rock Lodge, which continues to be one of the most popular resorts in the region. It was originally intended as a hunting and fishing retreat for the company’s executives, but its lodge and cottages were later opened to the public. White was also a skiing enthusiast, and in 1946, he transformed Split Rock into the area’s first ski resort.

  Tourism in the Poconos survived the demise of the railroads and even got a boost in the 1950s from the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which made the area even more accessible to residents of Philadelphia and its suburbs. However, once auto touring became the norm, people no longer sought out hotels convenient to railroad stations, and the Delaware Water Gap, as well as Stroudsburg and East Stroudsburg, lost business to resorts more remotely and romantically located.

  The Delaware Water Gap could be reached from Philadelphia via the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Company. The scenic gap is pictured in William B. Sipes’s book about the PRR.

  Known today primarily for its honeymoon havens with in-room swimming pools and kitschy bathtubs for two shaped like hearts and champagne glasses, this region is also beginning to rediscover its railroad heritage in towns like Jim Thorpe and Honesdale.

  Phoebe Snow

  How does one take a coal-hauling railroad and give it an aura of class, grace, even glamour? William H. Truesdale’s answer was Phoebe Snow, an advertising icon as widely recognized in the early twentieth century as the Pillsbury Doughboy and Betty Crocker are today. Phoebe Snow was created by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad’s advertising agency, Calkins and Holden. She was a pretty young lady who wore her hair swept up beneath a fashionably enormous hat. She always wore white linen and she spoke in rhyme, her most famous verse being a comment about her attire and a compliment to the cleanliness of the anthracite-burning DL&W:

  Says Phoebe Snow

  About to go

  Upon a trip

  To Buffalo:

  “My gown stays white

  From morn till night

  Upon the road of anthracite.”

  Phoebe’s image appeared on advertising placards in New York City’s elevated trains and in magazines likely to be read by those considering a trip to the Poconos, or any other destination served by the DL&W. In Phoebe Snow: The Lady and the Train, Don Dorflinger notes that within a decade, Phoebe had increased the number of DL&W passengers by 80 percent.

  Ever since Phoebe was conceived, people debated over whether she was a real person. In reality, her face and figure were created by an artist whose images were inspired by the photographs of a model who posed on, in, and around DL&W trains. The model was an actress named Marion Murray, who had played a part in The Great Train Robbery movie.

  The original Phoebe Snow campaign lasted from 1903 until World War I, but Phoebe reappeared in 1942 in military uniform. In 1949, the name Phoebe Snow was attached to a DL&W passenger streamliner fitted for comfort but powered by diesel. It ran between Hoboken, New Jersey (New York City), Scranton, and Buffalo. Actress Marion Murray was on hand for the inaugural celebrations. The train called Phoebe Snow survived the merger with the Erie until 1962. The name was revived the next year, and the train continued to run between New York and Chicago until 1966.

  Two Railroads Invite You to Travel …

  In the early years of the twentieth century, railroads that carried passengers to tourist destinations like the Poconos increased the demand for their services through advertising. In the days before cities and counties published their own visitor information, railroads published illustrated booklets in which the owners of hotels and boardinghouses or the purveyors of other amenities were encouraged to purchase advertising.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad included enticing descriptions of Pocono destinations in its published volumes of summer excursion routes. Its description of Cresco in its 1903 edition mentions Buck Hill Falls, where “the clear mountain stream falls nearly two hundred feet in a distance of half a mile,” and Tobyhanna, a “delightful mountain hamlet situated on the western slope of the beautiful Pocono Mountains, equidistant from Scranton and Stroudsburg,” where “the air is cool, pure, and invigorating, and the surroundings rich in scenic attractions.”

  Each year, the DL&W also published a volume on Pocono destinations. For each town where the trains stopped, the railroad listed useful information such as ticket prices, the names of hotels, their room rates, and whether they had facilities for favorite pastimes of the day such as shuffleboard, billiards, and croquet. It also gave flowery descriptions of each destination using the most glowing of terms.

  Following is a description of the Delaware Water Gap from the 1909 edition of Mountain and Lake Resorts on the Lackawanna Railroad, by George A. Cullen, general passenger agent of the Lackawanna Railroad:

  Here at the Water Gap, where the ragged rocks, majestic, bold and grand, that rear their frowning battlements on high, where glides the glassy stream of Delaware, the stranger’s heart with ecstasy will fill. No artist has been able to fix the subtle beauty of the Water Gap upon his canvas, no poet has sung with justice the charm here found, where mountain, sky and river meet. Smoothly flows the rippled river through a canyon 1600 feet in height.

  The approach is made so gradually, that the great scene breaks upon you unannounced. A sudden feeling of awe grips the heart. No pen can give a satisfactory description of the scene. It looks as if a mighty giant had, ages ago, torn a mountain in two with such a shock as would shake the earth to its center, and through the Gap there runs a silver stream fresh from the wedding of the waters, on its bridal trip to the sea. Within the portals of this mighty gorge is the new station building, with roads of white, like silver ribbons winding their ways to a hundred hotels and boarding houses in the modest little villages of the mountains….

  The Water Gap teems with romance of the days when red men ruled the earth and water. There are many places of interest near the Water Gap well worth visiting, such as Rebecca’s Bath, Eureka Falls, Moss Grotto, Lovers’ Leap, the Cold Cave, Caldeno Creek Falls, Cooper’s Cliff, Table Rock, Prospect Park, Hunters’ Spring, Mt. Minsi, Mt. Tammany, Sunset Hill, Mt. Caroline, Laurel Hill, Mt. Blockhead, Lovers’ Retreat, etc…

  Where is this paradise for pastime, this national playground? It’s about a two-hour ride from New York on fast, comfortable, and clean express trains, many of which do not stop between New York and the Water Gap. Special Service is maintained in summer for week end trips. Full information may be had in regard to the time of trains, Pullman reservations, etc. from the Lackawanna Railroad agent.

  Local Chapters of the National Railway Historical Society

  Although it does not consider itself a “Steamtown chapter,” the Lackawanna & Wyoming Valley Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society does work closely with the National Park Service, many of its members serving as employees or volunteers at the Steamtown National Historic Site. One important partnership with Steamtown started in 1995 to restore Boston & Maine Railroad’s steam locomotive Number 3713, which Steamtown will then place in passenger service. Chartered in 1973, the chapter publishes a newsletter called Laurel Lines and a very popular calendar. Its regular meetings feature educational entertainment.

  The Pocono Mountains Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society leased the Tobyhanna railroad station from the Lackawanna Railroad Authority in 1993 and began restoration of this 1908 building, which is sometimes open to the public on weekends or for special events. It houses model train layouts and memorabilia. This chapter also offers educational entertainment at its meetings and occasional excursions, as well as model train shows. Its publication is called the Phoebe Flash.

  The Region’s Railroad Giants

  John Taylor Johnston (1820–93)

  John Taylor Johnston went into the railroad business after realizing he did
not want to be a lawyer. To his new career, he brought a college education from New York University and a legal education from the Yale Law School. In 1848, he became president of the financially shaky Elizabethtown & Somerville Railroad, then in the hands of a banking firm called Boorman, Johnston & Co. Johnston consolidated his line with the Somerville & Easton Railroad, forming the nucleus of the Central Railroad of New Jersey and stepping into the role of its first president.

  Through his acquisition of the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad, with its access to Pennsylvania’s coalfields, Johnston increased the stature of the CNJ and its importance to the region. He also fostered the development of suburbs between Jersey City and Somerville with frequent passenger train service and attractive train stations. Because Johnston had primarily invested in his own railroad, the financial reverses of the CNJ after the Panic of 1873 brought about the loss of his personal fortune. He resigned in 1876, just before the CNJ went into receivership in 1877, after crippling strikes in the coal and railroad industries.

  Johnston had always had an interest in aesthetics. Today he is remembered more as a patron of the arts than as a railroad executive. His suburban stations included landscaped parks, and he initiated a program of prizes awarded to the stationmaster whose grounds looked the best. Johnston had been elected the first president of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, and he became its largest subscriber in 1871 with a contribution of $10,000. Together with William T. Blodgett, he financed the acquisition of the Dutch and Flemish paintings that would form the core of the museum’s early collection and win its reputation for excellence. Johnston had also been amassing an unrivaled private collection of paintings, which he displayed in galleries open to the public. After he lost his money, the 1876 sale of his art collection was the first great sale of art in New York City.

  Samuel Sloan (1817–1907)

  Samuel Sloan (not to be confused with the Philadelphia architect with the same name) entered the commercial workplace at the age of fourteen after withdrawing from Columbia College Preparatory School following the death of his father. After two years with one merchant, he joined another firm, where he worked his way up to the rank of partner, then head of the company.

  Around the middle of the nineteenth century, he began investing in railroads, which may have resulted in his election to the board of directors of the Hudson River Railroad in 1855. Later that year, he was elected president, a position he retained for nine years. Besides guiding the business through the Civil War, he improved the railroad’s physical plant and installed telegraph service. However, Sloan lost his job after Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired enough stock in the Hudson River Railroad to make himself president and install his son as vice president. In 1865, Sloan declined Vanderbilt’s offer to take over as president of the New York & Harlem Railroad.

  Thanks to the influence of his close and influential friend Moses Taylor, president of New York’s National City Bank, Sloan became president of the DL&W in 1867, where he remained until 1899. He transformed this line from a Pennsylvania coal road to a general freight carrier with connections to the Hudson River, Lake Ontario, and Buffalo. He also acquired coal lands and expanded the railroad’s market for coal in the greater New York City area with the lease of the Morris & Essex Railroad. He attempted to merge the DL&W with the CNJ, but the merger failed. It was Sloan who brought the DL&W into the modern railroad world by converting the system from its old six-foot gauge to standard gauge in 1876.

  In his book on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, Thomas Townsend Taber depicts Sloan as having been thrifty, private, and very religious. “He did not approve of railroad men working on the Sabbath,” Taber writes. “During his tenure of office the fewest possible number of trains ran on Sunday, and they were only milk, newspaper and mail trains.”

  William H. Truesdale (1851–1935)

  Starting out in 1869 as a clerk, William H. Truesdale worked his way through various positions in different aspects of railroading before he became president of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway in 1887. During the 1890s, he worked in executive positions for the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific. In 1899, he accepted an appointment as president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Thomas Townsend Taber and Thomas Townsend Taber III write in their book on the DL&W that “as soon as Mr. Truesdale assumed the Presidency, he started immediately on a program of great improvements. He was by nature a builder—and he built well.”

  Truesdale began by welding what had been a loose network of individual lines into what the Tabers call “one solid, homogeneous railroad.” It was probably no accident that on his watch, the line acquired a new nickname consisting of a single word, the Lackawanna, rather than a combination of initials. Truesdale built some of its most outstanding and attractive engineering features and structures, including the Tunkhannock Viaduct and the architecturally sophisticated passenger stations at Hoboken, Scranton, and Buffalo.

  He also inaugurated one of the most successful and clever advertising campaigns America saw during the twentieth century. Phoebe Snow, the fictional passenger in the immaculate white linen dress who traveled the road of anthracite, was an image that lingered for more than half of the twentieth century, personifying the mystique of railroad travel.

  Sampling the Region’s Railroad Scene

  Jim Thorpe and Environs

  The first things that visitors see when they enter the town of Jim Thorpe are a number of railroad cars belonging to the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway. They act as an advertisement for this railroad’s excursions. You can buy your tickets at a booth just outside what was once the CNJ station in Old Mauch Chunk. This brick building, considered one of the finest passenger facilities built by the Central Railroad of New Jersey, was constructed in 1868 and remained in service until 1963, officially closing in 1972, somewhat prior to Jim Thorpe’s Victorian renaissance. Today it serves as the local visitors center, where tourists can gather brochures and information. Sometimes the parking lot behind it is the only place visitors can park their cars, since this town saw most of its growth before the invention of the automobile and suffers from a critical lack of parking spaces.

  Visitors to Jim Thorpe interested in model trains need to visit the Hooven Mercantile Company Building near the CNJ station, where the second floor houses the Old Mauch Chunk HO-Scale Model Train Display, owned and operated by the Heery family. Here model locomotives representing various Pennsylvania railroads haul as many as fifty cars around a thousand feet of track that winds its way through an extensive cityscape. Although the layout is named for Mauch Chunk, some of its structures are modeled after buildings located in nearby Allentown. Adding variety to the layout are its vehicles other than trains, such as a tiny fire engine and ambulance that race endlessly around the block. The ceiling lights are periodically dimmed so that visitors can see the lights in the buildings come on, but even though the night scene includes a burning building, it is pretty tame compared with the extravaganza at Roadside America.

  The Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway ready to leave for an excursion out of the town of Jim Thorpe.

  Just up the hill from the CNJ station is the attraction that brought tourists back to Jim Thorpe, the mansion built in 1860 for Asa Packer, president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. This three-story Italianate residence was designed by architect Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia. In 1912, the house, together with all its period furnishings, became the property of the borough of Mauch Chunk following the death of Packer’s daughter Mary Packer Cummings. It languished vacant for many years, until the locals realized what a treasure they had on their hands. Opened to the public in 1964, it became increasingly popular in the 1980s as Americans rediscovered the charm of Victorian times.

  Its popularity sparked the restoration and reuse of other Jim Thorpe buildings of similar vintage, making the town even more popular with antiquarians than with railroad buffs. Just next door to Asa Packer’s mansion, a bed-and-breakfast operates in the former residence of Packer’
s son Henry. This flamboyant brick structure, constructed in 1874, is so quintessentially Victorian that it was chosen as the model for the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. The bed-and-breakfast is currently popular for its murder mystery weekends.

  Farther up Jim Thorpe’s main street, called Broadway, is the Mauch Chunk Museum and Cultural Center, which interprets the town’s industrial and cultural history. Exhibits include working models of canal locks and the famous Switchback Gravity Railroad. On the same street is Jim Thorpe’s most unlikely tourist attraction, the Old Jail Museum, which served as the Carbon County jail until 1995. This hulking and forbidding structure was considered a model correctional institution when it was built in 1871, and it earned its place in history between 1877 and 1879, when seven convicted Molly Maguires were hanged here. After leading our group around its twenty-eight narrow cells and a dark and gloomy dungeon not recommended for the claustrophobic, one guide paused beneath the jail’s reconstructed gallows and related the sad ending to the story of the Molly Maguires. She characterized Franklin B. Gowen as a greedy man who had cut the pay of the poor miners, but she mentioned nothing about the assaults and assassinations that the Molly Maguires had perpetrated. The tour ended at cell number 17, where an indelible ghostly handprint was purportedly made on the wall by a condemned Molly Maguire as a testament to his innocence.

  We heard more about the mysterious handprint when we traveled a few miles west to the No. 9 Coal Mine in nearby Lansford, from both our guide and the introductory video played in the adjacent museum amply filled with artifacts donated by the descendants of local miners. Originally opened in 1855, this mine was the oldest continuously operated anthracite mine when it closed in 1972. Open to visitors only since 2002, it’s relatively new to tourism.

  The lady who sold us our tickets warned that the No. 9 Coal Mine differed from the Commonwealth’s other tour-friendly mines in that it was more “minelike” and less like an underground museum. Among its original features is an underground hospital cut into the stone and used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a place to administer first aid to injured miners.