Although the P&LE’s terminal was not downtown, its location at the corner of Smithfield and Carson Streets placed it at an important transportation junction. The Smithfield Street Bridge linked this neighborhood to Pittsburgh proper, while the city’s oldest inclined plane provided access to Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington suburbs. The P&LE terminal was also near the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Birmingham Station, which served its Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, or Panhandle, lines. The P&LE replaced its modest two-story passenger station with a far grander depot and office complex designed by architect William George Burns and completed in 1901.
Although the P&LE suffered declines in passenger miles through most of the twentieth century, its efficient freight operations in highly industrialized river valleys kept earning profits. In fact, after it became a controlled subsidiary of the Penn Central Railroad, the P&LE lent the Penn Central surplus cash. After being permitted to drop out of the Penn Central system when Conrail was formed in 1976, the P&LE continued to operate until it was doomed by heavy losses in the steel industry during the 1980s. Part of the railroad was sold to CSX Corporation in 1991, and the rest was assigned to CSX in 1992, when the P&LE finally ceased operations. Its historic station has become the keystone of a massive redevelopment project and an inviting destination for tourists and Pittsburgh-area residents.
The Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal—Later the Pittsburgh & West Virginia
Before he died in 1892, Jay Gould had taken control of a number of midwestern, southwestern, and western railroads in pursuit of his dream of controlling a transcontinental railroad. One of the key parts of this network was the Wabash Railroad, which ran principally through Indiana and Illinois, connecting the Mississippi River, Chicago, and St. Louis with Toledo. His son George Jay Gould continued the acquisitions, ending up with a gap of about two hundred miles between the Western Maryland Railway, which he had acquired, and the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad, which he controlled. His solution was the Wabash Railroad-backed Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal Railway (WPT), incorporated in 1904, to extend from Pittsburgh Junction, Ohio, to the Golden Triangle of downtown Pittsburgh—territory the Pennsylvania Railroad had long dominated and would not be eager to share.
In their history of the Pittsburgh & West Virginia Railway, Howard V. Worley Jr. and William N. Poellot Jr. tell how this line was clandestinely planned and authorized. Joseph Ramsay, ostensibly president of the Pittsburgh & Mansfield Railroad streetcar line, secretly worked for George Jay Gould. Early in 1900, while claiming that he was only visiting friends, he scouted the route by which the WPT would enter town. Ramsay also worked to introduce legislation authorizing a railroad bridge over the Monongahela River, allowing everyone to assume it would be used by his streetcars. The Pennsy was sufficiently convinced that Gould’s Wabash system would never enter Pittsburgh, so in 1902, the railroad signed agreements allowing the WPT to cross its tracks in ten locations between Pittsburgh and its Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad connection. George Jay Gould himself refrained from visiting Pittsburgh until July 1903.
Even after Gould’s plans became evident, the executives of other railroads serving Pittsburgh consoled themselves with the belief that all the good routes into the city had already been taken. However, Gould’s engineer, James Patterson, managed to build a main line along the tops of ridges and hills with more than 150 bridges and numerous tunnels, including a tunnel through Mount Washington that brought the WPT tracks to its downtown Neo-Baroque, flatiron, ten-story terminal, which became known locally as the Pittsburgh Wabash Station or Palace Depot.
Joseph Ramsay became the WPT’s first president and was on hand to ride his private car into town on opening day, June 1, 1904. Unfortunately, when scheduled operations began about a month later, the first train left Pittsburgh with only a single passenger, and competitors were doing everything they could to see that this railroad would never do much better.
At the turn of the century, Gould had the support of Andrew Carnegie, who deplored the PRR’s pricing policies when it came to shipping the products of his mills. Carnegie had signed a tonnage agreement with Gould, but that did not prevent Carnegie from selling his steel mills to J. P. Morgan, placing the agreement in limbo and making freight prospects uncertain for the WPT.
Following the Panic of 1907, WPT’s deficits mounted. In 1908, the company was unable to pay the interest due on its first mortgage, and the railroad entered receivership that May. New owners acquired the WPT in 1916 after a court ordered the sale of its assets and property. These investors, led by J. N. Wallace, brought the railroad new ideas and operating plans, together with a new identity. The Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal became the Pittsburgh & West Virginia (P&WV) Railway in 1917. In 1928, the P&WV was authorized to extend its line to Connellsville. Operations began on these tracks in 1931, giving the P&WV a connection with the Western Maryland Railway, whose rails reached Connellsville in 1912. Though the economic conditions of the 1930s marked the beginning of a long struggle to keep the P&WV in business, the railway became a fast through gateway for hauling freight between the Midwest and East Coast.
In March 1946, one of the most disastrous fires in the history of Pittsburgh burned for forty-two hours at this railroad’s downtown freight terminal. In 1949, all the downtown facilities built for the Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal, including the Palace Depot, were razed to make room for the new buildings planned for Pittsburgh’s renaissance of its Golden Triangle. Around the same time, the railroad’s bridge across the Monongahela River was removed and its tunnel through Mount Washington abandoned and sealed.
In 1964, the P&WV became the Pittsburgh division of Norfolk & Western Railway, now Norfolk Southern, which today continues to serve industries located in the Ohio and Monongahela River valleys and Pennsylvania’s southwestern coalfields. The division’s Pittsburgh Line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh remains a main route between the Midwest and East Coast. The division’s other lines include its Mon Line between Pittsburgh and Waynesburg, its Fort Wayne Line into Ohio, and its Conemaugh Line along the banks of the Allegheny, Kiskiminetas, and Conemaugh Rivers. The division also includes two rail yards originally built by the Pennsy: Pitcairn Yard east of Pittsburgh, and Conway Yard west of the city, which had the honor of being the world’s largest rail yard following its expansion in the 1950s.
CSX Corporation
Unlike most of the Commonwealth’s other railroads, the eastern U.S. railroad and intermodal transportation company operating in twenty-three states known as CSX did not develop out of any great plan to connect two cities or transport any single important commodity. The evolution of CSX is a story of mergers, more or less concurrent with the Penn Central story, but with a happier ending. CSX Corporation was formed by the merger of the Chessie System and the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, initially in 1980 and officially on August 31, 1987, creating America’s largest railroad at that time.
The history of the Chessie System was also a merger story. The B&O had been facing problems resulting in a general decline during the 1950s, while the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) was operating as one of the most prosperous railroads in the East. The advantages to the C&O of merging with the B&O included an expansion in territory served plus the acquisition of debt that could be used as a tax advantage. Following informal arrangements in the 1960s, in which C&O management generally assumed control, the formal merger creating the Chessie System took place on February 26, 1973, with the Western Maryland also joining to create a system more than eleven thousand miles in extent.
Meanwhile, another merger story was unfolding in the South with the 1967 creation of the Seaboard Coast Line from the former Seaboard Air Line and the Atlantic Coast Line. In 1982, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was added, making this the Seaboard System Railroad, which later acquired a number of other smaller railroads.
The name CSX came from C for Chessie, S for Seaboard, and X for something else, perhaps the multiplied power of both systems. The name was supposed to be temporary, wi
th the member railroads retaining their own identities, but somehow it stuck, and the railway formally became CSX Transportation in 1986.
Following the division of Conrail between Norfolk Southern and CSX in 1999, CSX had to deal with the extensive and complex operations of integrating what it had acquired. However, the early years of the twenty-first century became a renaissance of reverse diversification, or a return to the basics of railroading, and the company’s headquarters moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Jacksonville, Florida. In general, Norfolk Southern acquired what had been the Pennsy’s operations in Pennsylvania, while CSX ended up with what had been part of the New York Central system plus the parts of the P&LE it had acquired in the early 1990s. This is why most of CSX’s thousand miles of Pennsylvania lines can be found in the southwestern part of the Commonwealth.
In 2008, CSX announced plans that would affect its operations in Pennsylvania. Called the National Gateway, this initiative included raising the vertical clearances of bridges and tunnels, allowing trains to carry double-stacked intermodal containers over a network of three corridors: one from North Carolina to Baltimore via Washington, D.C.; one between the North Carolina cities of Wilmington and Charlotte; and one from Washington, D.C., to northwestern Ohio via Pittsburgh. The initiative also included the building or expansion of intermodal terminals. Pennsylvania’s governor met with the CSX chairman and CEO in December of that year to announce the project at an event hosted at the railway’s intermodal terminal in Chambersburg, which was an important link in the overall plan. The project is scheduled for completion in 2015.
The Wheeling & Lake Erie
In the 1990s, a group of investors made plans to essentially reconstitute what had been the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway (W&LE). They purchased more than five hundred miles of track from Norfolk Southern plus additional trackage rights in 1990, then added supplemental trackage rights following the breakup of Conrail.
Originally conceived as a connection between coalfields around Wheeling, West Virginia, and Lake Erie ports, the original railroad began construction in 1871, proceeding in fits and starts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The line was leased by the Nickel Plate in 1949 and merged into Norfolk Southern’s ancestor, the Norfolk & Western Railway, in 1988, which dissolved it in 1989.
Following some difficulties in the early 1990s, the new incarnation of the W&LE is now a successful regional railroad employing more than four hundred people. It has the advantage of connections with three Class I railroads in CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Canadian National. The W&LE still moves coal but has made the most of new opportunities to move a great deal of grain to local receivers, as well as iron and steel, plus the products of forests and quarries.
Carload Express
Headquartered in Oakmont, Carload Express began operating in 1992 and currently operates three short-line railroads: the Allegheny Valley Railroad (AVR) and Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad (SWP), serving Pittsburgh-area businesses, and the Camp Chase Railroad, serving the Columbus, Ohio area. The company offers a variety of transloading options and handles about twenty-six thousand carloads per year.
The Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad is owned by Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, where its sixty-six miles of track run from Greensburg to Smithfield. The railroad was created in 1995 from branches acquired from CSX and Conrail. It connects with CSX, Norfolk Southern, and the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway. Most weekends, its tracks between Uniontown and Dunbar or Fairchance are used by the Fayette Central Railroad for passenger excursions.
Carload Express doubled in size in 2004 when it leased the ex-B&O tracks for its Allegheny Valley Railroad from CSX. AVR operates about seventy miles of track into Pittsburgh from several points northeast and southwest of the city. It connects with CSX, Norfolk Southern, the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad, and the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway.
As its traffic has grown, Carload Express has added locomotives and repaired tracks on both the AVR and SWP. In 2009, Carload Express began to take on customers supporting the development of the shale gas industry in the portion of the Marcellus Shale geological formation located in southwestern Pennsylvania.
In 2010, the Allegheny Valley Railroad reported that plans were progressing for running commuter trains into Pittsburgh on its tracks from the city to the suburbs of Verona, Oakmont, New Kensington, and Arnold. The proposed diesel-powered trains would run into Pittsburgh’s Strip district and connect with the Port Authority light-rail system. Since the commuter trains would operate in the daytime, they would not interfere with AVR freight trains, which mostly run at night. Though still in the study stages, trains could be operating as early as 2014.
Rail Stories of the Region
Pennsylvania’s System in Pittsburgh
The 1826 legislation that authorized Pennsylvania’s canals in the western portion of the Commonwealth also provided for a canal that would run from Pittsburgh along the Allegheny River to a junction with the Kiskiminetas River. Construction was somewhat delayed by controversy over how the canal would approach the city that had grown at the point of land where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet, sometimes called the Golden Triangle. The decision of whether the canal would be constructed on the north or south bank of the Allegheny was really a matter of choosing whether the commercial activity that would evolve around its basin would benefit the city of Pittsburgh or the borough called Allegheny, just north of the river.
It was eventually decided that the canal would enter the borough of Allegheny, where its main line would cross the Allegheny River by aqueduct to Pittsburgh. An extension would give canal boat operators the option of proceeding to another basin on the north shore, from which they could pass through locks to the Allegheny River. After considering three different routes for the canal through Pittsburgh proper, the city’s two councils agreed that the canal would be built along what is now Eleventh Street to Liberty Avenue, then along the present Grant Street, passing beneath the obstacle of Grant’s Hill through a tunnel, and continuing through several locks to the Monongahela River.
The Golden Triangle of Pittsburgh, as depicted in Eli Bowen’s 1852 Sketch-book of Pennsylvania.
Guns were fired from the artillery and thousands of spectators watched on November 10, 1829, when the aqueduct was filled with water and three packet boats maneuvered into Pittsburgh. At 1,140 feet long, this particular aqueduct was the longest in Pennsylvania’s State Works, but it leaked and later had to be rebuilt. John Roebling was chosen for the job, and he replaced it with an early example of the wire suspension bridges for which he later became famous. The canal’s other expensive and challenging engineering feature, an 810-foot tunnel beneath Grant’s Hill, was intended to take canal boats to where the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal was expected to enter the city. The tunnel was completed in 1831, but it also leaked, and both of its openings were frequently damaged by earth slides.
Over the next twenty years, as Americans acknowledged the superiority of railroads over canals, expensive repairs to Pittsburgh’s canal became increasingly difficult to justify. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal never did reach Pittsburgh, making the tunnel a particular liability. By the 1850s, canal operations ceased and the locks, canal basins, and tunnel were gradually filled in.
The Pittsburgh canal made news a few more times during the twentieth century, when construction workers excavating to erect modern buildings occasionally came across its relics. In 1911, men working on the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Telephone Company building found the remains of an old canal boat, and in 1967, the tunnel was rediscovered by those working on a building for U.S. Steel.
The Pennsy or the B&O?
Pittsburgh’s canal did not operate long, but it did promote the growth of Pittsburgh’s iron and glass industries, making rail service more desirable to residents of the city. In 1846, the same year that Pennsylvania’s legislature was considering an act to “incorporate the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company,” it was also struggling with the key issue
of whether to give the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad one more chance to reach Pittsburgh, since it had failed to make its charter’s original deadline.
Pittsburgh, the “western terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad,” as shown in William B. Sipes’s 1875 book on the railroad.
Residents of both Pittsburgh and Baltimore favored giving the B&O more time, because the railroad was going to reach the Ohio River at some point, which might as well be Pittsburgh. They argued that constructing the B&O line would cost the Commonwealth nothing. The B&O also had tracks on the ground, whereas it remained to be seen whether a Pennsylvania Railroad would ever be more than a concept. Philadelphians, however, insisted that the prospect of B&O service to Pittsburgh would sink the State Works and also scare investors away from the proposed Pennsylvania railroad project. With all the trade of the West then flowing into Baltimore, Philadelphia would face ruin.
Legislation enacted that year permitted both railroads to proceed but gave the new Pennsylvania Railroad Company an advantage. If the Pennsy secured $3 million in stock subscriptions by the end of July 1847 and constructed fifteen miles of railroad at each end of its line, the B&O would lose its Pennsylvania charter.
The Pennsylvania Railroad met these requirements, and its remaining construction work progressed rapidly under the leadership of J. Edgar Thomson. By 1852, trains could run between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, though they had to use portions of both the old and new portage railroads built by the Commonwealth until the Pennsy’s Mountain Division was completed in 1854. In the Pittsburgh area, the Pennsy’s tracks roughly followed the course of Turtle Creek and ended at the railroad’s first downtown station, located at Twelfth Street and Liberty Avenue.
The B&O got a second chance at Pittsburgh’s rail traffic in 1864, when plans were made to extend the little Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad, chartered in 1837, to Cumberland, Maryland, and connect it with the B&O. Thomas A. Scott, then president of the PRR, not only got the charter repealed for the Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad, but also secured legislation allowing a new entity that would be controlled by the Pennsy to take it over. When both bills passed in the wee hours of an April morning, one senator expressed his disgust for the power that the Pennsy was able to wield with his often-quoted acid inquiry, “Mr. Speaker, may we now go Scott free?”
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 30