An area once dominated by factories, including the original headquarters of the Westinghouse Air-Brake Company, the Strip has been associated more recently with the food distribution industry. Early in the twentieth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad built its produce sheds there, including its 1926 Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit Auction & Sales Building, which is several blocks long.
A building constructed by the Pennsy for the auction and sale of fruit stretches for blocks along Pittsburgh’s Strip.
For many years, the Strip has been the place to go for fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, and Chinese and other ethnic foods. In the seafood section of Wholey’s Market, you can purchase fresh fish off the ice or even fresher fish still swimming in tanks. A model train runs on a looped track suspended from the ceiling. The Strip now also has office buildings, ample parking facilities, and a new hotel. A number of old warehouses are being transformed into restaurants done up in postindustrial chic. The TV chef and restaurateur Lidia Bastianich has a popular restaurant at Fifteenth and Smallman Streets.
The district’s largest tourist attraction is the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, located in a building that used to be an icehouse. Exhibitions tell the story of 250 years of social life and industrial development in the region. Railroad artifacts do not dominate this museum, but it would be impossible to interpret the history of Pittsburgh without its transportation history: visitors can find material recalling the 1877 strike, the old Allegheny Portage Railroad, and the first locomotive to reach the city.
Model Railroading in the Region
Model railroad fans can tour the Miniature Railroad & Village at the Carnegie Science Center, a museum on the North Side not far from the city’s football stadium. The layout was established by Charles Bowdish of Brookville in 1920. Its models reflect life in western Pennsylvania from 1890 to 1930, and they occupy twenty-three hundred square feet of display space.
The layout is not the frozen vision of its founder, but rather something that is regularly updated and expanded by museum staff members. Once they select a historic structure they would like to reproduce, they take a series of photos and measurements, then duplicate the structure in miniature, sometimes using unconventional materials, such as angel hair pasta for the ivy on one of the homes in the tiny replica of Liverpool Street. The Miniature Railroad & Village incorporates complexes that illustrate the industries of the Pittsburgh area, including a steel plant, coal-mining equipment, coke ovens, and quarries. Its historic replicas include John Roebling’s house and workshop, attractions from popular amusement parks in Altoona and Kennywood, and Bowdish’s house.
Besides the four or five trains always in motion, more than a hundred figures are animated by individual motors. People dance and children play on swings, but everyone’s favorite animation is the tiny dog that repeatedly lifts his leg against a tree. Guides with flashlights are on hand to make sure visitors miss nothing and realize, as one guide commented, “All of Pittsburgh’s history is right here.”
Actually, there’s even more Pittsburgh history to be seen at two model railroading attractions outside the city. In nearby Gibsonia, at the Western Pennsylvania Model Railroad Museum, the layouts include a scale model of the tracks between Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Maryland. The Laurel Highlands Model Railroad Club in Somerset interprets and recreates the history of the Pittsburgh, Westmoreland and Somerset Railroad.
Railroad Artifacts outside Pittsburgh
Although most people would identify Pittsburgh’s George Westinghouse as an electrical manufacturer, his invention of the air brake was an important milestone in railroad history. It is said that while riding in a train that collided with another, Westinghouse conceived the idea of a single brake that could be applied by the engineer, rather than the brakemen riding on individual cars, and would save a lot of lives and train equipment. Westinghouse air brakes were first tested by the Pennsylvania Railroad on its Panhandle lines in the Pittsburgh area and first manufactured in Pittsburgh’s Strip district. Westinghouse then moved production to the handsome new foundries and shops in the model industrial town he laid out in Wilmerding, just a few miles from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation plant in Turtle Creek Valley.
In Schenley Park in Oakland, there’s a marble monument honoring George Westinghouse and his major achievements, but it isn’t too easy to find. Pittsburgh’s grand memorial to Westinghouse is the bridge that bears his name and carries the Old Lincoln Highway, Route 30, across Turtle Creek Valley. It also spans the main-line Norfolk Southern tracks, which used to belong to the Pennsylvania Railroad, with what some claim to be the longest concrete arch in the world. Ever since it was erected between 1930 and 1932, the George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge has been the portal to Pittsburgh for those arriving by train.
Geography made the greater Pittsburgh area a region of bridges, and visitors can even find crisscrossing bridges in the Larimer suburb. In 1902–03, William H. Brown, chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad, constructed a stone arch bridge as part of a freight cutoff from the railroad’s main line. The stone is actually facing over a concrete structure, but this bridge closely resembles Brown’s Rockville Bridge across the Susquehanna, with which it is nearly contemporary. In 1906, the Lincoln Avenue Bridge was constructed to carry Lincoln Avenue over Washington Boulevard, and its arches were designed so that it would fit beneath the earlier railroad bridge.
Like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh has its share of remaining Victorian suburban railroad stations, including one built for the Pennsy in Edgewood. Constructed in 1903 in the Shingle style, with a brick and shingle façade, this structure is thought to have been designed by Frank Furness or his firm, which would make it the only surviving Furness structure in modern Pittsburgh. The Port Authority of Allegheny County renovated the station as part of a development plan for this area.
Latrobe Station
There’s nothing to prove that Benjamin Latrobe ever visited the town named for him by his friend Oliver Barnes, a Pennsy engineer, who laid it out in 1851. By the early twentieth century, Latrobe was a busy industrial town where many daily or weekly passenger trains stopped. In western Pennsylvania, only Altoona, Johnstown, and Greensburg were busier passenger stations. During this period, the PRR expanded the number of tracks passing through Latrobe and elevated them for safety. In 1903, the railroad built the present station building.
It’s difficult to attach a specific architectural style to this edifice. On its application for the National Register of Historic Places, the station is described as “eclectic Victorian.” The front façade has a roof parapet with coping that is characteristic of the Mission style. It hides a steeply pitched roof that gives the main waiting room an open-truss, walnut-paneled ceiling that looks medieval and might have been inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement or Tudor style. The metalwork embellishing the extended porch over the front door could be described as a restrained Art Nouveau, and the front façade sports finials recalling the Chateau style.
Once the PRR passenger station at Latrobe, now DiSalvo’s Station Restaurant.
The original building included a main waiting room flanked by a baggage room, a women’s waiting room, and restrooms. Today a restaurant occupies the building, with its main dining room in the former main waiting room and a bar in the old baggage area. The current restrooms look original. An elegant railroad dining car is parked outside in the space that would have been between the station and the elevated railroad tracks, which is decorated to suggest a Mediterranean courtyard with a fountain.
This unique edifice might have been demolished after the station’s abandonment in 1970, but it was instead restored and reopened by the DiSalvo family in 1986 as DiSalvo’s Station Restaurant. We visited on a Thursday in the summer of 2011, arriving just as folks were setting up an outdoor beach party on a vacant lot adjacent to the restaurant. We might have checked out the party after dinner, if not for a sudden downpour. We ate in the main dining room, where we were able to admi
re the railroad memorabilia, such as framed PRR calendar pages, sharing the wall space with the restaurant’s many culinary awards. Where the walnut paneling ended at a height of about six feet, a model railroad track ran around the dining room’s perimeter, but that evening the trains were not running.
Before our food arrived, I wandered into the courtyard and peered into the dining car, where the restaurant offers a special menu called Prima Classe every Friday and Saturday. I also discovered the pedestrian tunnel running beneath the tracks to connect the eastbound and westbound platforms.
The food was excellent. The Grand Concourse in Pittsburgh might have a better view, but DiSalvo’s counters with an appealing quirkiness and some of the best linguine with white clam sauce I’ve twirled around a fork. Pennsylvania’s best train station restaurant? It’s got to be a tie.
Harlansburg Station
Harlansburg never had a real train station, but it now has a building that resembles one and houses the Museum of Transportation, the collection of retired airline pilot Don Barnes. The tracks behind the station lead nowhere, serving instead as necessary foundations for the four railroad cars that Barnes collected, including two built during the 1910s for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Two other cars were built in the 1940s for the Santa Fe Railroad and later purchased by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Barnes’s railroad memorabilia comes from the various railroads that operated in the region, including the B&O, the Pennsy, the Erie Lackawanna, and the P&LE.
It may look like a railroad station, but the only trains that ever came to Harlansburg are those collected by Don Barnes for his transportation museum. HARLANSBURG STATION
Darlington Train Station
In 1877, a Westmoreland County man named Judge Thomas Mellon built the Ligonier Railroad, which connected the town of Ligonier with the Pennsy’s tracks in Latrobe. Its trains carried freight and passengers, whose custom Mellon promoted by creating a picnic park near the Darlington Station. In its heyday, the railroad ran several round-trips a day with a train people called the Doodlebug or the Dinky.
The railroad went out of business in 1952, but the park remained and is known today as Idlewild Park, popular with families for its water attractions. In 2002, two local men named Bill McCullough and Bob Stutzman commemorated the train’s final run with a presentation at the Ligonier Library, which drew an unexpectedly large crowd. The general manager of Idlewild Park interested them in preserving the Darlington Train Station, which was still standing next to the park, and in 2006, the park sold the station to the newly organized Ligonier Valley Railroad Association.
With the help of donations and grant money from local foundations, including the Richard King Mellon Association, the Darlington Train Station opened in 2010 as the Ligonier Valley Rail Road Museum. It now houses railroad memorabilia and has a donated caboose sitting on tracks outside, which also draws visitors. The association is planning to purchase functioning rolling stock and hopes to work with Idlewild Park in operating it as a ride.
The Ligonier Valley Rail Road Museum now occupies the old Darlington station. No train rides yet, but maybe someday.
Waynesburg & Washington Engine Number 4
The region once had a narrow-gauge railroad that linked Waynesburg in Greene County to a connection with the Pennsy in the town of Washington in Washington County. Unlike the East Broad Top, this line is gone, but a key artifact remains at the Greene County Historical Society’s museum.
In a 2001 article in The Keystone, the magazine of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society, James Weinschenker tells the history of Number 4, a locomotive used primarily to haul freight on the Waynesburg & Washington Railroad (W&W) from 1916 to 1933. The Pennsylvania Railroad refurbished Number 4 in 1958 for display at the Greene County Fairgrounds, where it remained in open display for seventeen years.
After the Greene County Historical Society obtained the old “county poor farm” to serve as a museum, Number 4 was moved to the site and restored by railroad buffs in 1977–78. In 2000, Number 4 was cosmetically restored a second time and displayed at the local fall festival. The engine remains on the museum’s grounds.
An engine that once ran on the narrow-gauge Waynesburg & Washington Railroad is now at the museum of the Greene County Historical Society. JAMES D. WEINSCHENKER
The Kiski Junction Railroad
The small town of Schenley in Armstrong County, where the Schenley Distilling Company was formerly located, is now the headquarters of the Kiski Junction Railroad. The railroad originated in 1995 with the purchase of a small, active freight line from Conrail that had once been part of the Pennsy’s Pittsburgh-to-Buffalo line but saw its first traffic in 1856 as part of the Allegheny Valley Railroad. Its tracks run along the Kiskiminetas River and over an 1899 bridge.
The railroad’s main business consists of hauling cars of scrap metal from a plant in the town of Bagdad to a Norfolk Southern connection at a place called Kiski Junction, where the PRR’s Conemaugh Division met its Allegheny branch. Ever since 1996, the railroad has also been running tourist excursions. In 2011, it made three tourist runs per week using what one rail fan described online as “home modified” passenger cars. On weekdays, passengers may be riding on mixed freight runs. In 2010, the Kiski Junction announced that the railroad might be extended to a nearby mine on recommissioned former Conrail tracks.
Fayette Central Railroad
The original Fayette County Railroad opened in 1860 between Uniontown and Connellsville. Uniontown was connected with Fairmont, West Virginia, by a short line that had long been nicknamed the Sheepskin Route, which was acquired by the B&O in the 1890s. The system became part of the Chessie System, later CSX, with some trackage removed in the 1980s. In 1996, CSX sold the remaining railroad to Fay-Penn Industrial Development Corporation. Currently, freight is handled by the Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad, while the Fayette Central Railroad has offered tourist excursions since 2006.
Passengers used to ride in a Budd diesel car, but in 2011, the Fayette Central Railroad acquired vintage passenger cars that will be pulled by a 1948 locomotive that the railroad had previously saved for special occasions. The passenger trips originate in Uniontown and run either to Dunbar and the Youghioheny River Bridge or to Fairchance and Smithfield.
Lorett Treese Travels
Its website said no reservations were necessary, so we did not bother to call ahead to book an excursion on the Fayette Central Railroad while we were staying at a nearby mountain resort called the Summit Inn, located on a mountaintop outside Uniontown. We drove carefully down an extremely steep hill, alerted by the many warnings posted for truck drivers, and arrived at the Fayette County seat a little more than an hour before the train was scheduled to depart. We followed the website’s directions to a vacant parking lot adjacent to empty railroad tracks, where we found a sign advertising scenic train rides but no one and nothing else to tell us whether we were in the right place.
The day we rode the Fayette Central Railroad, our excursion train consisted of a B&O locomotive and two cabooses.
We decided to take a walk through town to see what was going on. Since it was a Saturday morning, a town that would normally be humming with courthouse business was almost ghostly quiet. We located the sturdy stone courthouse, which was connected to the equally substantial county jail by an enclosed second-story passageway that seemed to have been inspired by Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. After passing by several deserted park areas with benches, we finally found three human beings working in the lobby of a theater, where they had come to conduct auditions. They told us that Uniontown did have coffee shops, but none that were open at that early hour on a weekend.
We went back to our car, which we had parked across the railroad tracks from a funeral home established in a building that looked as if it had started life as a factory. When the digital time and temperature billboard on the side of this building read 10:04 a.m., we were heartened to hear the short blast of a distant diesel horn, which we assumed had com
e from our 11:00 excursion train. Within a few more minutes, another car pulled up and a rail fan who was meeting friends from Pittsburgh emerged to ask us where to buy excursion tickets. There was no booth or kiosk in sight and we had no idea, so we joked with him: What are they going to do? Set up a card table?
Other rail fans started to arrive, and we numbered about thirty when a louder diesel horn blast announced the approach of our train. Although the website had promised that vintage passenger cars would be accommodating tourists during the 2011 season, they were not yet ready that late-July weekend. The train consisted of a B&O diesel locomotive pushing two cabooses, one marked P&LE, the other Penn Central. I had ridden the short-lived Penn Central, but the passenger cars had not been painted the arresting turquoise of this caboose. When the train stopped, crew members got off and, as we had jokingly suggested earlier, actually did set up a card table.
An un-air-conditioned caboose on a ninety-degree day in July would not have been very appealing, but the Penn Central caboose had large, open platforms front and rear, and the conductor said we could stand outside once the train got moving. As we rode across narrow trestle bridges over the many streams in the wooded area where the tracks were built, I had a chance to speak with our conductor, who was also acting as brakeman, our conversation interrupted by many grade-crossing warnings of the diesel horn.
The Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad, which uses these tracks on weekdays, used to operate two days per week—maybe. But business had developed of late, and freight trains now ran every day, including very early some weekend mornings, so as not to interfere with the Fayette Central’s excursions. The freight trains hauled lumber, parts for the windmills of a wind farm being developed locally, and a great deal of sand for southwestern Pennsylvania’s shale gas industry. In a small rail yard that we passed through and at several places along the tracks, I could see small piles of overflow sand. The conductor told me there was talk about expanding the existing rail yard and adding more tracks.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 33