Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  Work did not have to begin entirely from scratch, since surveys had already been conducted. Merchants and concerned citizens of Philadelphia already had hired a man named Charles E. Schlatter to survey routes for a transportation alternative to the State Works, and by 1840, he had identified three possible routes. Schlatter favored one following the valleys of the Juniata and Conemaugh, and this indeed became the trans-Commonwealth route of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

  When the deadline of July 30, 1847, arrived, the PRR had managed to meet its financial obligations and had under contract twenty miles of track west of Harrisburg plus fifteen miles east of Pittsburgh. The plan was to join these two segments with the existing Allegheny Portage Railroad over the mountains. While track work got started, the railroad placed its first order for three locomotives and seventy-five freight cars.

  September 1, 1849, was the big day when the Pennsylvania Railroad initiated service on more than sixty miles of track between Harrisburg and Lewistown. According to Philadelphia’s North American and United States Gazette, the event “was marked by a pleasant festive party, numbering in all about one hundred and forty persons, who came together at the invitation of the Engineers. Great interest was manifested all along the route on the passage of the first train of cars, and at all the stations large crowds were gathered. Quite an excitement prevailed.” The railroad’s first timetable indicated that one passenger train would make this trip each way daily. By mid-September, the same newspaper reported that a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger car was brought into Philadelphia so that “citizens may have an opportunity of observing for themselves the character of the cars in which passengers are to travel over the road.” By the following month, a private company was running freight cars between Philadelphia and Lewistown.

  But Lewistown was not Pittsburgh, and in that city a degree of skepticism seemed to prevail, possibly because the PRR had abandoned construction at the Pittsburgh end of the line once the railroad met the stipulations of its charter. In October 1849, a letter published in the Philadelphia Inquirer from a PRR engineer in Pittsburgh to the Pennsy president might have been printed to offer reassurance. The writer states that despite delays above Lewistown, the line would be completed to Hollidaysburg by the following summer. The “heaviest” sections of railroad between Loyalhanna and Pittsburgh would be under contract by the spring. Indeed, the PRR completed the line from Harrisburg to McVeytown by the end of 1849. In December, another Philadelphia newspaper commented on the revived enthusiasm of Pittsburgh businessmen.

  In 1850, construction continued, including work extending the line from Pittsburgh to Turtle Creek, until the PRR was connected with the Allegheny Portage Railroad in the autumn. An article published in the North American and United States Gazette the following year reports that “passengers will be carried between this city and Pittsburgh, over the Pennsylvania Railroad and its connections to Johnstown whence they will be conveyed by canal, for the very moderate sum of $10. The route is most attractive, as well as expeditious, and it cannot fail to be largely patronized.”

  It was December 10, 1852, when the first train from Philadelphia via the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Allegheny Portage Railroad made the entire trip by rail. However, the inclined plane segment was not suited to the transport of livestock, nor had it been designed with passenger comfort in mind. Moreover, the Allegheny Portage Railroad was still owned by the Commonwealth and operated by government workers, who suspected that the Pennsy was out to eliminate their jobs as soon as possible, and therefore they were not inclined to be overly cooperative.

  J. Edgar Thomson had been the Pennsy’s chief engineer since 1847. He had examined Schlatter’s surveys and been responsible for selecting the route west of the Susquehanna, drawing upon his knowledge of European rail engineering. He was well aware of progress being made by the B&O and Erie railroads. To prevent the Pennsy from becoming a distant third, he wanted the railroad to bypass the Allegheny Portage Railroad by borrowing money it did not have. When it became necessary to challenge the Pennsy’s more conservative president, Thomson won and was elected president in February 1852. By that fall, the capital Thompson needed had been raised via bond issue.

  The big challenge in terms of engineering was the Allegheny Mountain, a steep escarpment or cliff that separated the eastern portion of Pennsylvania from the Allegheny Plateau, which continued the rest of the way to Pittsburgh. To get a train up this steep slope, it would have to ascend one thousand feet in twelve miles. To replace the inconvenient inclined planes, Thomson built a modified switchback system to lengthen the route and reduce the grade. Tracks were constructed along one side of a valley that ended at a place called Kittanning Point, then over a man-made fill, and from there up the other side of the long, deep valley. The tracks continued through several more curves to Gallitzin, where a tunnel eliminated the rest of the climb.

  Construction of what became known as the Pennsy’s Mountain Division was completed on February 15, 1854. Soon after, the nation’s newspapers were reporting on the arrival of the first train over the mountain to Pittsburgh. A February 17 account in the Baltimore Sun says, “The passenger train over the new portion of the Pennsylvania Railroad, through the great tunnel, avoiding the inclined plains [sic] arrived here today at one o’clock, P.M., in fifteen hours from Philadelphia.” An opinion piece printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on February 21 boasts, “It is fact beyond all question, that Philadelphia occupies a higher position at the present time in a commercial point of view, than at any other point in her history. She had just perfected one great work—the Pennsylvania Railroad, and she has determined to contribute in the most liberal spirit, to various other important facilities of trade and travel.”

  The Pennsy had started double-tracking its route in 1853 to eliminate the need to shuttle trains off onto sidings to allow trains moving in the opposite direction to pass. By the end of 1854, the Horseshoe Curve was double-tracked, together with the rest of the Mountain Division. By the end of the nineteenth century, America’s business and demand for transportation caused the PRR to triple-track the curve in 1898, then expand it to four tracks in 1899–1900. When even that was not enough, the Pennsy took another look at the old New Portage Railroad and relaid some of its tracks, adding another tunnel at Gallitzin, both of which opened in 1904.

  The Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad

  In 1988, CSX divested itself of lines in western Pennsylvania that had entered their system as part of the B&O, conveying to Genesee & Wyoming Inc. lines stretching from Buffalo, New York, to Eidenau, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh. This plus other lines in New York State that Genesee & Wyoming had acquired more or less reconstructed the old Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway, established in 1887 from two smaller railroads to haul coal from western Pennsylvania to the New York cities of Buffalo and Rochester. It had Pittsburgh in its name even though it never actually had terminated in Pittsburgh proper, and it had been absorbed into the B&O system back in 1932.

  The tracks had suffered considerable neglect, and the breakup of Conrail in 1998 threatened the short line with considerable loss of bridge traffic, but by the mid-2000s, the railroad had managed to turn things around. It focused on business opportunities within the geographic area served by the Buffalo & Pittsburgh, such as reopening a short line that had been moving materials to a power plant while it had been under construction, in order to ship coal to the same plant.

  Today the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad continues to operate as a regional freight subsidiary of Genesee & Wyoming Inc., incorporating nearly four hundred miles of track in the western part of Pennsylvania and New York. The railroad still does not terminate in Pittsburgh, though trains connect with the city via the Allegheny Valley Railroad. The B&P also connects with Canadian Pacific Railway, Canadian National, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and SEDACOG’s Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad, among others. The B&P hauls a lot of coal but also carries other commodities. This railroad is
the largest subsidiary of Genesee & Wyoming Inc. in Pennsylvania, which also owns the Aliquippa & Ohio River Railroad and the Pittsburgh & Ohio Central Railroad in the Commonwealth.

  The Region’s Rail Stories

  Pennsylvania’s System in the West

  News that construction work was beginning on the Erie Canal in 1817, followed the next year by news of the completion of the National Road from Baltimore to the Ohio River, could hardly have been welcome in Pittsburgh. Where was its link to the Eastern Seaboard? Pittsburgh’s citizens wanted to know.

  Their answer came in 1824 in the form of legislation appointing canal commissioners to examine various possible routes for a canal from the eastern part of Pennsylvania through natural waterways to Pittsburgh. A second act created a second commission in 1825, whose deliberations called for one canal between Middletown and the mouth of the Juniata River and another along the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Kiskiminetas River.

  Construction began in 1826, even though it was unclear at that time how to join the two canals, which would be separated by a chain of well-timbered mountains drained by unnavigable streams. In 1828, the same year that the legislature authorized construction to begin on a railroad between Philadelphia and Columbia, its members also authorized a railroad that would somehow manage to get freight and passengers across the Allegheny Mountains. Engineer Moncure Robinson was chosen to determine its route.

  The portion of the State Works that would connect the Susquehanna River with the Allegheny Mountains consisted of two divisions. The eastern terminus of the eastern division was changed from Middletown to Columbia in order to join the railroad planned to terminate in that town. It was designed to follow the eastern shore of the Susquehanna and employed aqueducts to cross the streams that emptied into the river. The Juniata Division began at Duncan’s Island, where the Juniata joined the Susquehanna, and its western terminus was eventually extended to Hollidaysburg, 127 miles away.

  The Conemaugh Viaduct as depicted in History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

  By the mid-1830s, other canal divisions were added to the State Works main line, including the Susquehanna division between Duncan’s Island and Northumberland, the north branch division between Northumberland and Pittston, and the west branch division between Northumberland and Farrandville. Along the Commonwealth’s eastern border, the Delaware division linked Bristol near Philadelphia with the Lehigh Canal at Easton.

  While the canal commissioners were overseeing various excavations, the railroad engineers were locating the Allegheny Portage Railroad. This thirty-seven-mile double-track rail system opened in 1834 and included ten inclined planes, five on either side of the summit of the Allegheny Ridge. At first, horses moved its cars along the level portions of track between the planes, where the cars were hauled upward by stationary steam engines, but the horses were gradually replaced by steam locomotives.

  A trip on the Allegheny Portage Railroad introduced passengers to several groundbreaking engineering features, including America’s first railroad tunnel, which was more than nine hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. A stone arch bridge over the Little Conemaugh River was reputed to be America’s most perfectly constructed arch and drew many sightseers until it was destroyed by the Johnstown Flood in 1889.

  The engineers of the day also came up with canal boats cleverly constructed in detachable sections that could be hoisted onto railroad cars and then reassembled on the other side of the mountains. These eliminated the time wasted in unloading the boats and transferring their freight to railroad cars, but they failed to save enough time to make the State Works competitive with other transportation systems being proposed or constructed.

  By 1840, the Commonwealth had conducted further surveys for a railroad that did not incorporate inclined planes, and in 1855, a system called the New Portage Railroad was opened to traffic. Most historians have concluded that the $2.5 million spent on its construction was a huge waste of taxpayer money, because the railroad was being built at the same time that the Commonwealth was negotiating the sale of the entire State Works to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which quickly dismantled the railroad once the Pennsy had established its own mountain route.

  This sketch illustrates how vessels were moved from canals onto inclined planes. It is taken from William Bender Wilson’s 1899 History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, but the same sketch also appeared in other publications.

  When the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the State Works in 1857, the deal included the Commonwealth’s entire system of canals. At first, the railroad tried to honor the obligation placed on it by Pennsylvania’s legislature to keep most of the canal system in good repair and operating condition. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, the canals consistently earned less in tolls than the cost of upkeep, and by about 1900, they were closed and abandoned.

  The Logan House

  Although the Pennsylvania Railroad managers planned a system that would carry passengers between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh more rapidly than the old State Works combination of railroads and canals, it was clear that they would still need a place for passengers to rest and refresh themselves along the way. In Altoona, a town the railroad constructed to house its repair shops, the Pennsy built the Logan House, a hotel named after an Indian leader well known in central Pennsylvania, who had taken the British name Logan from James Logan, William Penn’s secretary.

  The PRR’s Logan House in Altoona as depicted in Philadelphia and Its Environs.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad station in Altoona as it looked in 1875 in an illustration for William B. Sipes’s book about the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

  Completed in 1855, this fine hotel constructed right beside the Altoona station was Italianate in style. It was four stories high and stretched for two hundred feet right along the railroad tracks. It was luxuriously furnished with red carpeting, upholstered furniture, gas lights, and a veranda where guests could socialize. The successful Logan House was expanded by seventy rooms in 1872. Its distinguished guests included Andrew Carnegie, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, William Howard Taft, and Abraham Lincoln’s wife and children, who came to escape the heat of Washington, D.C. In his 1875 book on the Pennsylvania Railroad, William B. Sipes notes, “This house has become a model for many similar institutions in all parts of the country.”

  Sipes’s book also suggests that the Logan House would have been popular with early rail fans:

  Immediately in front of the Logan House is an open station, built entirely of iron, elaborately ornamented, and paved with slate flagging, under which all passenger trains over the road stop. From the veranda of the hotel a view is had of this entire station, and probably at no other place in America can such immense amount of railroad travel and traffic be seen. At almost every hour of the day and night trains are arriving and departing, carrying passengers from all parts of the country, and thousands of tons of freight go rushing by to the marts of trade and commerce. The clang of the engine-bell never ceases; and, to the man unfamiliar with the science of railroading, inextricable confusion would seem to exist. But so far from this being the case, the most perfect system prevails, and the immense business of the road is transacted with precision and regularity.

  Even those who did not stay overnight could enjoy the amenities of the hotel’s dining room. When a train stopped, its passengers were typically accorded twenty minutes for a meal, an allotment capably met by the staff at the Logan House. Altoona residents patronized the Logan House for weddings and other functions, and everyone enjoyed the vanilla ice cream that was made from an exclusive recipe. But business dropped off as dining cars and sleeping cars made railroad hotels obsolete, and the Logan House was razed in 1931.

  The South Pennsylvania Railroad

  A war of titans waged during the 1880s by the Pennsy and the New York Central left Pennsylvania with a number of monumental railroad artifacts. It also brought J. P. Morgan, one of America’s leading bankers, in
to Pennsylvania’s railroad history as the man who finally negotiated peace.

  In an article on the situation published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Albro Martin explains that hostilities began with a genuine need for a railroad on the west shore of the Hudson River to open the Catskill resort area in upstate New York and to provide through service to Boston for passengers from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., who wished to avoid New York City. Attempts made to fill this need during the 1870s were hampered by the nation’s financial condition following the Panic of 1873.

  The 1880s saw the birth of a line called the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railroad, commonly known as the West Shore. Though this railroad had problems paying its bills, it was successful enough to arouse the suspicions of William Henry Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central, which operated what would become a competing line on the Hudson’s opposite shore. Suspecting that the West Shore was truly being assisted and controlled by his archrival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Vanderbilt decided to build a railroad that would directly compete with the Pennsy’s main line.

  Among his allies in this endeavor, Vanderbilt could claim Franklin B. Gowen, whose Philadelphia & Reading Railroad stood to gain a friendly connection to the west. Andrew Carnegie also strongly favored the idea of a railroad that would compete with the Pennsy for the output of his steel mills and even offered to raise $5 million for the project in Pittsburgh. Robert H. Sayre of the Lehigh Valley Railroad agreed to be responsible for operating this company line.

  In 1884–85, construction work progressed on the railroad, which was commonly called the South Penn because it would be located south of the Pennsy’s route through the Juniata Valley between Harrisburg and a connection with the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad, then under Vanderbilt’s control. Workers began with its engineering features, which included piers for a bridge over the Susquehanna and a series of tunnels that would enable the trains to run through the Allegheny Mountains.