We learned a lot about modern coal mining from our guide, who spent his weekdays working in an operating mine. We also had an interesting mine experience when the locomotive pushing our mine cars into the drift mine derailed on the way in. While I fished in my purse for an umbrella, anticipating a long walk back to the entrance through a dark and dripping tunnel, our engineer was able to rock the locomotive back onto its tracks, and the tour continued as scheduled.
Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway
For nearly half a century, Jim Thorpe’s CNJ station has been the place to board a train for a scenic excursion. From 1962 until 2004, “Yesterday’s Train Today” was operated by Rail Tours Inc. The standard ride was about eight miles over tracks that once served anthracite mines from Nesquehoning to Hauto. When we took this ride on a summer day years ago, we found it to be a frustrating experience, because the tracks were so hemmed in with thick foliage that we could see nothing.
In 2003, the Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern Railroad began building the short stretch of track that would connect its Reading and Lehigh divisions. Its efforts made possible an excursion that would leave Jim Thorpe on ex-CNJ tracks, switching over to lines built by the Lehigh Valley, and crossing two restored bridges as the train proceeded parallel to the Lehigh River through Glen Onoko and Old Penn Haven, long a CNJ and Lehigh Valley junction and former home to a hotel frequented by track maintenance workers and hunters. This sixteen-mile route was far more scenic than the old train ride, in fact, passing through an area accessible only to hikers, bikers, kayakers, or tourists on the train.
The RBMN excursion railroad called the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway celebrated its grand opening on Memorial Day in 2005. By 2010, the RBMN passenger division reported a total ridership of fifty thousand and an expanded schedule on the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway.
Scranton and Steamtown
Thanks to the timely order for iron rails from the New York & Erie Railroad, the Scranton family business was saved and the city of Scranton was able to expand with new streets, more housing for its workers, and mansions for its entrepreneurs. An elegant hotel called the Wyoming House opened in 1852, and by 1853, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad chose Scranton for the hub of its operations. Scranton quickly surpassed Carbondale as northeastern Pennsylvania’s largest city.
Despite opposition from residents and leaders of nearby Wilkes-Barre, in 1878, Luzerne County was split into Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties. Scranton became a county seat and acquired additional showcase structures, including the stone courthouse, still standing today near the city’s center square by the city hall, which boasts a Gothic bell tower and stained-glass windows. Once served by a number of railroads in addition to the DL&W, Scranton went into sharp decline following World War II, together with the anthracite coal mining and railroad industries. All passenger service ceased in the 1970s, and the magnificent Lackawanna Station was closed and boarded up.
In 1986, Congress created Steamtown National Historic Site, which opened in Scranton in 1995 following an expenditure of $66 million on the old DL&W rail yards. Its stated purpose was to interpret the evolution of steam railroading throughout the United States, but many Scranton residents hoped Steamtown would also stimulate the local economy by bringing in tourists likely to stay overnight.
One of the steam-powered passenger excursions leaves Steamtown.
Vintage cars and locomotives greet visitors to Steamtown.
Steamtown was and remains a fusion of two components. Its structures were more or less abandoned between 1902 and 1912, as William Truesdale diverted repair work to shops in locations other than Scranton, some of them being later adapted to service diesel locomotives. Steamtown’s collection of locomotives, passenger cars, and cabooses was once the private collection of Nelson Blount of Bellows Falls, Vermont; it was relocated to Scranton during the mid-1980s by the subsequently bankrupted Steamtown Foundation.
Steamtown could not have become part of the National Park Service had its mission been limited to telling the story of a single railroad, but the history of the DL&W is not neglected in its exhibitions, which reflect the life and times of William Truesdale as well as the early-twentieth-century advertising icon Phoebe Snow. The broader mission of the site is accomplished by exhibits focusing on railroad technology in general, such as the actual working of a coal-burning steam engine. In the site’s massive roundhouse, which circles a fully functioning turntable, visitors can sometimes watch workers as they restore locomotives and passenger cars and prepare the excursion locomotives for their rounds.
In the height of tourist season, there’s always something going on at Steamtown. Visitors can take ranger-led shop tours, train excursions to Moscow or Tobyhanna, and shorter excursions on the Scranton Limited. Sometimes costumed interpreters present living history programs. From time to time, a locomotive is moved from the roundhouse to the turntable to introduce visitors to the routines of its maintenance. The schedule seems designed to invite guests to stay all day. For lunch, you can cross a bridge spanning the tracks separating Steamtown from the Steamtown Mall and its food court, though a short walk through town will take you to the far more interesting Coney Island Texas Lunch, where you can indulge in the Texas wieners that have been popular in Scranton since 1923.
The turntable at the heart of Steamtown.
Each year, Steamtown hosts RailCamp, an event sponsored by the National Railway Historical Society. Young people spend time touring and working at the site to learn the basics of railroad preservation. On Memorial Day 2011, Steamtown hosted another special event, with displays of military equipment and vehicles in a tribute to American service-members. The event featured a special train ride to Nicholson over the famous Tunkhannock Viaduct.
Steamtown tends to overpower Scranton’s other rail heritage attraction, the Lackawanna Coal Mine and adjacent Anthracite Heritage Museum. On a day in late June 2011, we watched the light disappear at the end of a tunnel while a hoist lowered our 1970s mine car down Slope 190 into the cool depths of the mine. The guide described mining and miners’ lives around the turn of the twentieth century. Railroaders like to advise people to stay out of the gauge, but in these tunnels, we found the space between the rails to be the best place to avoid the damp coal dirt. Our favorite exhibit included advice about what to do in case of a rock slide.
Scranton’s prettiest railroad artifact is the new hotel at the old Lackawanna Station, which is also a tribute to the wealth that was once created by the combination of coal mines and railroads. Completed in 1908 by New York architect Kenneth Murchison, this Renaissance-style train station was the crowning glory of William H. Truesdale’s plan to upgrade passenger stations all along the DL&W’s route. Scranton and its Lackawanna Station were important enough that several departments of the DL&W corporate headquarters were relocated there from New York. In the early 1980s, it was hoped that the building’s restoration would spark revitalization in Scranton’s downtown. The hotel was renovated and upgraded by new owners in 2005, possibly spurred by competition from a new Hilton that had been built across the street.
The front façade of the Lackawanna Station is faced with limestone and decorated with columns and pilasters, as well as a huge clock framed by eagles. Its most impressive area is its grand lobby, where opulence starts at the mosaic tile floor, extends up sienna marble walls, and culminates in a barrel-vaulted stained-glass ceiling open to a skylight above. Faience panels installed just above eye level depict scenes along the route of the DL&W between Hoboken and Buffalo. The best way to drink in the atmosphere is to take a seat at the restaurant called Carmen’s, which occupies half of the lobby. A number of Scranton locals told us it’s the best restaurant in town. The former offices of the station’s upper levels have been converted into hotel rooms that allow guests to experience modern luxury together with traces of the past, with many original windows and the wooden benches from the lobby’s waiting-room days now positioned by the elevators. A room at the rear of the stat
ion gives guests a view of trains making regular excursions from Steamtown.
Only the fact that it shares the same address would cause one to associate the former Erie railroad station with another popular restaurant in Scranton: Cooper’s, located at 701 North Washington Avenue. That the place specializes in seafood is rendered obvious by its lighthouse addition and the octopus and pirate mannequins on the roof. Among its many dining rooms is one called the Train Room, where a model train makes its rounds on a track near the ceiling, passing over large models of segments of the Tunkhannock Viaduct built into an end wall on either side of a massive fireplace. Scranton locals must really love their railroad heritage, because when we visited Cooper’s on a weekday evening, most of the other dining rooms were sparsely populated, but the Train Room was nearly full.
Mine cars being hoisted out of the Lackawanna Coal Mine in Scranton.
The elegant Lackawanna Station in Scranton is now a hotel.
A restaurant now occupies most of the hotel’s lobby in an area where passengers once waited for trains.
The Erie Lackawanna Dining Car Preservation Society
The Erie Lackawanna Dining Car Preservation Society (ELDCPS) has been in business since 2001, pursuing the ambitious mission of recreating the passenger and dining car experience on the Erie Lackawanna. When members learned that the former Erie Lackawanna dining car number 741 was in storage at the Everett Railroad, where it would be scrapped, they made their first rolling stock purchase and began making restoration plans. Subsequently, they broadened their objective with their Lake Cities Project, intended to re-create an entire Erie Lackawanna long-distance train from the 1960s, which had been called the Lake Cities and made its final journey from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Chicago in 1970. The idea is to operate dining service just as the old railroad did, with patterned china, flatware, and even individually wrapped toothpicks and mints.
The society now owns three dining cars, but dinner is not quite yet being served. Though the ELDCPS website states, “‘Home’ for our cars is the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad in Scranton,” at the beginning of 2011, two of their diners were housed in Kansas City and the third was in Tennessee. However, plans were in place to move all three. In April 2012, one dining car was en route to Scranton.
The society also owns a sleeping car called the City of Lima, which had been used on the Nickel Plate Road and was donated to the ELDCPS in 2003. The Nickel Plate had been a partner of the DL&W when it came to passenger service, since DL&W passengers could board Nickel Plate trains in Buffalo and continue on to Chicago or Saint Louis. The City of Lima arrived in Scranton in 2007 and has been used on excursions, though it is not routinely available for visitor access. Additionally, the society has three commuter cars that arrived in Scranton in February 2011. These were the last passenger cars ordered for the Erie Lackawanna, and had been operating for NJ Transit on former Erie Lackawanna lines until 2009, when they were retired. The society plans to use these passenger cars for excursions to raise money for the restoration of their other equipment. Check the society’s website for upcoming events.
Because the passengers’ interactions with the porters were an important part of the long-distance train experience, the society has taken an interest in interpreting the lives of these African American men. In February 2011, in honor of Black History Month, the ELDCPS partnered with Steamtown to present George: The Story of a Pullman Porter in the Steamtown theater.
The ELDCPS invites anyone interested to become a member, which allows you to attend members-only open houses, receive a newsletter, and have access to a members-only blog. Member donations support the society’s preservation activities. Those with a more casual interest can follow the society’s activities on its Facebook page.
Erie Relics in the Endless Mountains
The steep hills and deep creekbeds near Pennsylvania’s border with New York in the eastern part of the Commonwealth are known as the Endless Mountains. Residents of isolated villages like Lanesboro enjoy pretty scenery that hasn’t changed much since Emily Blackman’s description of the area in her 1873 History of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania: “The vicinity of Lanesboro, and especially that of Cascade Creek, was a favorite resort for parties of pleasure. Its trout were unsurpassed, and its falls a charming feature of otherwise picturesque scenery…. As late as 1846, the town consisted of but one hotel, the mills, one store, and a cluster of houses.”
Minus the mills and hotel, Lanesboro still has a cluster of houses, some of them now huddled beneath a massive stone railroad viaduct constructed as part of the westward expansion of the New York & Erie Railroad. Known as the Starrucca Viaduct because it spans Starrucca Creek, when new it was the most expensive bridge ever built and one of the last constructed with stone masonry. Today it is believed to be the Commonwealth’s oldest stone viaduct still in use.
The valley carved by Starrucca Creek is a quarter mile wide and more than a hundred feet deep, and it lay directly in the route chosen for the Erie between the Delaware and Susquehanna Valleys. Since it was too deep to traverse with an embankment, the Erie’s managers chose engineer Julius W. Adams to design the bridge and James P. Kirkwood to supervise construction. They built a bridge with seventeen arches, 1,040 feet long and wide enough to eventually be double-tracked. Although the northern end of Starrucca Viaduct is about 12 feet higher than the southern end, the arches were designed to make the bridge look perfectly level. The viaduct was built in a surprisingly short period of time. Beginning in August 1847, as many as eight hundred men labored on the bridge, making it ready for its first locomotive by December 1848.
The Starrucca Viaduct, completed in 1848, is still in use.
The Starrucca Viaduct, as depicted for the July 1850 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
An article about the scenery along the route of the Erie appearing in the July 1850 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine applauds the railroad for its “triumphs of art over the most formidable obstacles, which nature has, at almost every step, raised against the ironclad intruders into her loveliest recesses.” Starrucca Viaduct was “simple in its design, but symmetrical and beautiful … altogether the noblest piece of work upon the whole line of the road.” Expensive though it may have been, Starrucca Viaduct must certainly have paid for itself in its more than a century and a half of continuous use. It was designated a national historic civil engineering landmark in 1973 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. It is now part of the Norfolk Southern system and still used by freight trains.
In her history of Susquehanna County, Blackman also mentions a nearby town called Susquehanna: “During the construction of the great works of the Erie Railroad at this point, it became quite a business place,” even drawing off some of the former business of Lanesboro. Modern Susquehanna remains a bigger town than modern Lanesboro, with a bigger business district and its own Erie artifact: a sizable depot said by some to be the first brick passenger station in North America, built in 1863 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The structure once included a dining hall for Erie passengers and was a restaurant for a time. The space is currently available for banquets.
Tunkhannock Viaduct
At Nicholson, another Endless Mountain valley is spanned by another viaduct constructed as part of an early-twentieth-century improvement program to increase the capacity and operating efficiency of the DL&W. To eliminate curves and thus save time on passenger schedules, the railroad relocated its Hoboken-to-Buffalo line boldly along hillsides. The project required two viaducts—one over Martin’s Creek and a far larger one over Tunkhannock Creek.
Designed by Abraham B. Cohen, Tunkhannock Viaduct is 240 feet high and 2,375 feet long. It was built of reinforced concrete and consists of ten 180-foot arches plus an additional two abutment arches anchoring it to its approaches. Work began in 1912, and the structure was completed in 1915. Tunkhannock Viaduct was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 after having be
en designated a national historic civil engineering landmark in 1975. Like Starrucca Viaduct, it is also still in use as part of the Sunbury subdivision of Canadian Pacific Railway.
The Tunkhannock Viaduct. Passing trains are better seen from the streets of Nicholson than from the railfan park just outside town.
Though visitors sometimes have trouble locating Starrucca Viaduct, which is off the beaten path, Tunkhannock Viaduct, at more than double the size, is hard to miss. It dominates the skyline of the valley over which it soars and makes the humble buildings of Nicholson look like a model train layout. However, since it first appeared, it has earned compliments for the graceful appearance achieved by its arches inspired by classical or Roman architecture and a surface scored to resemble masonry. When people unfamiliar with railroad history see the Tunkhannock Viaduct for the first time, many think it’s a reproduction of a Roman aqueduct—which may have been precisely what its architect had in mind.
Honesdale, Hawley, and Lackawaxen
In Honesdale, the headquarters building for the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company is still open for business on Main Street, where it now serves as the museum for the Wayne County Historical Society. The small brick building has housed the historical society since 1923 and has been open to the public since 1939. It has been expanded several times, including the recent addition of a small brick building that was formerly a county surveyor’s office before it was moved to the spot in 1981.
The historical society’s exhibition interprets the history of the D&H from 1828 to 1898 and includes a replica of the Stourbridge Lion built by D&H employees in 1932, positioned so that its painted lion face is peering through a window at passersby on Main Street. A passenger car named the Eclipse gives visitors an opportunity to sit in one of its upholstered seats beneath a stenciled ceiling while being entertained by a video production on the history of the Gravity. Images of some of the D&H’s founders round out the display, including a model for a statue of Horatio Allen that might have been erected in Honesdale’s park, except for the exigencies of the Depression.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 24