Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  We arrived at our destination in Dunbar, where the crew members helped us off near a small park. While the crew departed for an establishment called Stefanick’s, we tourists were warmly welcomed by volunteers at the Dunbar Historical Society, who offered refreshments and information on their town and the contents of their small museum.

  When passengers and crew were once again aboard the train, we continued north. We passed beneath an abandoned trestle, then ventured out onto a bridge over the Youghioheny River. Just ahead were the CSX tracks that the Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad shared with CSX north of the river. We could see and hear a long CSX freight train that was passing the outskirts of Connellsville. Our engineer greeted it with the diesel horn and got a greeting in return before our locomotive pushed us back to Uniontown.

  While we had been waiting for our train in the Uniontown parking lot and chatting with that other early-arriving rail fan, I had remarked about our futile search for an open coffee shop in the town: “What, no Starbucks?” Just before we boarded our train, our rail fan friend appeared with two bottled Starbucks Frappuccinos he had purchased at a local CVS pharmacy. Thirsty on the ride back, I remembered those two bottles in my utility bag. They were still cold.

  The Region’s Rail-Trails

  Greater Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties are diagonally crossed by the Great Allegheny Passage System, nearly 150 miles of rail-trails incorporating various viaducts and tunnels linking the outskirts of Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Maryland, where the system connects with the C&O Canal Towpath to Washington, D.C. The system is overseen by the Allegheny Trail Alliance, an umbrella group of partner organizations in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The system incorporates shorter preexisting trails and was designed to be a spine for other feeder trails such as the Panhandle Trail, which connects with the Montour Trail, which will connect this system with Pittsburgh International Airport and Coraopolis.

  This is not a train station; it’s a visitors center in West Newton for users of the Great Allegheny Passage.

  In the towns through which the system’s trails pass, users will find an increasing number of amenities, such as bike shops, B&Bs, and trailside cafés. For example, the town of West Newton has a visitors center constructed to resemble a train station right on the trail, where trail users can pick up local information, use restrooms, and get a drink of cold water. Nearby are a restaurant and deli appropriately named the Trailside Restaurant, a bike shop, and a pizza place. The little town called Ohiopyle is surrounded by a state park, but trail users can find a variety of restaurants and lodging options here.

  The Armstrong Trail is an artifact of the Allegheny Valley Railroad, which was incorporated in 1852 and built between 1853 and 1856 to link Pittsburgh and Kittanning and serve the industries of the Allegheny River valley, including those producing materials important for manufacturing steel, such as coke and firebrick. After oil was discovered farther north in Pennsylvania, the line was extended toward Oil City in 1868. The railroad went bankrupt attempting to construct a low-grade line to circumvent the Allegheny Mountains, and it was leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1900. Conrail sold parts of the line in 1992 to the Allegheny Valley Land Trust, which created a rail-trail with the support of the Armstrong Rails-to-Trails Association. More than thirty miles in length, the Armstrong Trail has numerous trailheads in the towns through which it passes, though there are some breaks in the trail. The Kiski Junction Railroad is reclaiming a segment of the trail north of Schenley.

  Other rail-trails in this region include the Great Shamokin Path, Cowanshannock Trail, Butler-Freeport Community Trail, Roaring Run Trail, Stavich Bicycle Trail, Indian Creek Valley Bike Trail, Coal & Coke Trail, Sheepskin Trail, Greene River Trail, Westmoreland Heritage Trail, West Penn Trail, Hoodlebug Trail, PWS Trail System, and Five Star Trail.

  Pittsburgh’s pleasant Oakmont Borough is home to the pedestrian-only Arboretum Trail, which is about a mile long, making it the region’s shortest.

  SECTION EIGHT

  Pennsylvania’s Great Lakes Region

  Great and Growing Railways of the Region

  The Bessemer & Lake Erie

  The earliest ancestor of the Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad (B&LE) was a short line called the Bear Creek Railroad, chartered in 1865 to move coal from a mine owned by the Mercer Mining and Manufacturing Company to an ancestor of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. Its name was changed to the Shenango & Allegheny Railroad in 1867. In 1888, the railroad emerged from receivership with yet another name: the Pittsburgh, Shenango & Lake Erie Railroad.

  In his book on the Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad, Roy C. Beaver describes how its new owners quickly expanded the railroad from a local carrier that served only two counties to a freight line connecting ports on Lake Erie with Allegheny, the borough on Pittsburgh’s North Side. This would put the railroad in a position to move iron ore from Michigan and Minnesota to Pittsburgh, where it was used in making steel.

  Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh’s largest steel producer, purchased the Pittsburgh, Shenango & Lake Erie Railroad and transformed it via merger into the Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad, chartered in 1900, making it essentially a private line for delivering iron ore to his blast furnaces. However, the real value of this north-south B&LE line to Carnegie was probably that it connected with four major railroads in addition to the Pennsy, giving Carnegie, who had long been dissatisfied with the rates of the PRR, new options for moving his steel to market. In his biography of Carnegie, Harold L. Livesay notes that Pennsy executives suddenly became eager to discuss freight rates after having dismissed Carnegie’s previous complaints. Carnegie remained unmoved when they reminded him of his prior connection with the Pennsy and negotiated a rate cut in exchange for a promise that he would not create any more new railroad systems.

  The B&LE trains could and did travel to Erie, via the tracks of the railroad called the Nickel Plate Road, but the B&LE’s principal port on Lake Erie was and still is Conneaut, Ohio. In 1898, Andrew Carnegie purchased the entire Conneaut Harbor area and modernized its equipment, creating a facility where iron ore could be efficiently transferred from his fleet of ore ships into ore cars. Also around this time, the railroad expanded its passenger traffic by investing in the development of Conneaut Lake Park, near Meadville, Pennsylvania, which became popular for summer agricultural fairs and other expositions.

  When Carnegie sold his steel empire in 1901, the B&LE went with it into the new U.S. Steel Corporation, where it remained for almost a full century. The B&LE became part of a holding company called Transtar in 1998 and another called Great Lakes Transportation in 2001. In 2003–04, it became part of Canadian National.

  The Nickel Plate Road

  The New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad was born in a bank in 1881, when a group of wealthy capitalists subscribed a substantial amount of cash to build a shorter route between Buffalo and Chicago. This railroad owes its nickname, the Nickel Plate Road, to an Ohio newspaper that dubbed it the “nickel plated railroad” because it had such solid financial backing and lucrative prospects. The Nickel Plate was constructed in only five hundred days and opened for business by October 1882. Just three days later, it was sold to a man working on behalf of William H. Vanderbilt, whose son William K. Vanderbilt was installed as its president a few months later.

  As it happened, the tracks of the Nickel Plate ran parallel to those of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway, which Vanderbilt already owned. At the time, many financiers speculated that the Nickel Plate had really been built to force Vanderbilt to buy it or face competition. Vanderbilt allowed the Nickel Plate to operate as part of the New York Central system, but he made certain that it never performed up to its potential.

  In 1915, the New York Central Railroad was informed that recent antitrust legislation made it illegal for it to operate parallel lines, causing the railroad to go shopping for friendly buyers. The Nickel Plate became the property of Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and Mantis James Van Sweringen, sometimes called “t
he Vans,” two bachelor brothers in the real estate business in Ohio, who subsequently used its right-of-way for a much-needed rapid-transit line connecting their suburban development, Shaker Heights, with downtown Cleveland. With the aid of John Bernet, the Vans also revitalized the Nickel Plate and began to contemplate creating their own railroad empire. They quickly established a seventeen-hundred-mile system through mergers with the Toledo, St. Louis & Western Railroad and the Lake Erie & Western Railroad. Additional leases and acquisitions expanded their system further, and for a time, it was said by some to be the largest railroad group in the world.

  Their Nickel Plate emerged as a freight line best known for the speedy transportation of meat and other perishables from Chicago to Buffalo, where they could be shipped to eastern cities via connecting lines. Although its major terminals were located outside the Commonwealth, a tiny percentage of the Nickel Plate’s tracks ran through the neck of land that gave Pennsylvania access to Lake Erie, where the railroad also served the city of Erie and other lakeshore communities.

  In the 1950s, the potential merger of the New York Central with the Pennsy inspired the Nickel Plate to seek its own partner. It eventually merged with Norfolk & Western Railway in 1964. The Nickel Plate Road Historical & Technical Society, an organization that continues to preserve and interpret this railroad’s history, was formed in 1966 and has chapters in several states.

  Canadian National

  Canadian National’s transcontinental lines in Canada reach from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, but its system map clearly shows it is not just a Canadian railroad, but a North American railroad. Its tracks extend not only east and west in Canada, but also north and south from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. One of its lines extends south into Pennsylvania.

  Canadian National (CN) was created between 1918 and 1923, an amalgamation of government railroads and recently bankrupted railroads that had fallen into government hands. A major change in the railroad’s status and management approach took place in the 1990s, as Canadian law was enacted to privatize CN. By November 1995, the government had completed an initial public offering and transferred all shares to private investors.

  By that time, CN already owned U.S. subsidiaries operating under their own identities, primarily in the Midwest and New England. The 1992 NAFTA agreement seemed to bless international north-south commerce with the approval of both the U.S. and Canadian governments. In 1999, CN announced its intention to merge with Burlington Northern Santa Fe to form a corporate entity to be called North American Railways, but the deal was called off when four other major railroads objected.

  In 2003–04, CN acquired the property of Great Lakes Transportation, including what had been the Bessemer & Lake Erie, as well as the Pittsburgh & Conneaut Dock Company and the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway, which CN wanted in order to complete a gap in its midwestern trackage. The Pittsburgh & Conneaut Dock Company continues to operate a rail-to-lake terminal in Conneaut, consisting of multiple docks where stone products and sand are received and coal and energy products are loaded onto vessels plying the Great Lakes. The former B&LE line, now called CN/BLE, runs south to a connection with the Union Railroad Company and a river-to-rail terminal called Duquesne Wharf southeast of Pittsburgh.

  Behind this Canadian National office building is a state-of-the-art bulk products terminal facility in Conneaut, Ohio.

  Union Railroad began operations in 1896 as a union or consolidation of small railroads serving steel plants in the Monongahela River valley. It connected with the B&LE and delivered incoming raw materials. Today’s Union Railroad consists of sixty-five miles of track plus many yards and sidings still serving the steel, coke, and coal industries, as well as other customers. The Duquesne Wharf also dates from 1896, when it was constructed as a transfer port for coal coming from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania and heading for the Great Lakes. The equipment at the wharf has been upgraded over the years, most recently with a high-tech crane. It still handles coal barges on the Monongahela, Kanawha, and Ohio Rivers.

  Western New York & Pennsylvania Railroad

  The Western New York & Pennsylvania Railroad (WNYP) is a freight short line operating in western New York State and northwestern Pennsylvania centering on a former Erie yard in Olean, New York. The original Western New York & Pennsylvania Railroad was formed in 1883 from a consolidation of smaller railroads, and it operated independently until 1900, when it became part of the Pennsy system. After the railroad became the property of Conrail, the Interstate Commerce Commission authorized abandonment of tracks between Corry and Meadville in 1994. Several municipalities whose businesses were served by the line formed the Northwest Pennsylvania Rail Authority, planning for operation of the line by the Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad.

  However, a new WNYP was formed in 2001 on tracks leased from Norfolk Southern between Hornell, New York, and Corry. The following year, this WNYP bought the Corry-to-Meadville segment, replacing the Oil Creek & Titusville as operator and spending more than a year making repairs to the physical plant. The WNYP expanded further in 2007 by leasing NS tracks between Machias Junction in New York and Driftwood in Pennsylvania, its system then forming a cross intersecting at Olean. In 2008, the railroad began improvements to its yard in Meadville. The railroad has seen a boost in business in recent years thanks to the shale gas industry. In 2011, railroad officials joined with Schlumberger to unveil plans for a sand transfer terminal in Emporium, where sand hauled in by train will be loaded onto trucks for delivery to wells in Cameron, Potter, and Clearfield Counties.

  Rail Stories of the Region

  Rail Transportation and Erie

  Erie became famous in 1813 as the scene of Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. Erie’s natural harbor was a fine one, but as the Midwest became increasingly settled in the early nineteenth century, it was difficult for ships sailing from the west to enter the harbor, and the citizens of Erie watched as neighboring Buffalo grew much faster than Pennsylvania’s only Great Lakes port.

  The 1830s and 1840s saw several attempts to provide Erie with better transportation connections with the rest of the Commonwealth. The 1830s found the locals agitating for a railroad from Erie to Sunbury, which later became the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad. In 1845, a canal opened, connecting Erie to the Ohio River. The Pittsburgh & Erie Railroad, formed to connect Erie with the B&O, was incorporated in 1846 but failed before it actually built a railroad.

  The Erie & North East Railroad was incorporated in 1842 to connect railroads in New York and Ohio. Within a decade, it had constructed a rail line with a section of six-foot gauge; this made it necessary for passengers and freight to change trains in Erie. In 1853, its owners decided to change to standard gauge so that the gauge would be uniform between Cleveland and Buffalo. Many citizens of Erie resented this seemingly sensible business decision because they saw it as something else that would contribute to Buffalo’s growth at their expense. It didn’t help that this same railroad refused to extend its tracks directly to Erie’s harbor.

  In his 1899 History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, William Bender Wilson included this illustration of Erie in 1840, a time when its citizens were agitating for a railroad.

  In an article titled “Erie’s Railroad War,” published in Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Donald A. Grinde Jr. writes about the “Rippers” of Erie and neighboring communities, who proceeded to rip up railroad tracks until the U.S. government threatened to send in federal troops in 1854. While the tracks remained ripped, freight and passengers were forced to travel between Erie and Harborcreek by old-fashioned stagecoach or wagon.

  A compromise allowed the railroad (which eventually became part of the New York Central system) to build its standard-gauge tracks, provided that Erie’s harbor got rail service. The railroad paid the Sunbury & Erie Railroad to take on that task, and Erie became a stop on the Pennsy system when that railroad leased its successor,
the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad, in 1862. The PRR also leased another railroad, the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad, which had opened between New Castle and Erie in 1864 and built a branch to the docks in 1865.

  The city of Erie had given the Pennsy 130 acres of bayfront, which the railroad proceeded to seal off with a belt line completed in 1870. This prevented any other railroad from having easy access to the bayfront and may have been one reason why the B&LE’s principal Lake Erie port was in the neighboring state of Ohio. The Philadelphia & Erie Railroad developed its waterfront with piers from which grain, coke, lumber, and a great deal of coal were shipped, mainly by a firm called the Anchor Line. In the 1890s and early 1900s, business was very good.

  Erie’s port was always its most important feature. William B. Sipes shows how it looked in his book about the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

  Charles L. Heisler also contributed to Erie’s prosperity with a railroad-related business he founded after obtaining a patent in 1892 for a locomotive designed for the logging industry. Heisler locomotives were manufactured in Erie until shortly before the Second World War.

  Pennsylvania’s Oil Boom

  In the 1850s, a Connecticut company was seeking a way to sell the petroleum that was known to exist not far below the ground’s surface in northwestern Pennsylvania, where one of the bodies of water was even named Oil Creek. The company hired Benjamin Silliman Jr., a chemistry professor at Yale, who predicted that petroleum would make good fuel for the lamps that lit people’s houses. The company then sent former railroad conductor Edwin L. Drake to Titusville, where he leased land. There, on an August afternoon in 1859, Drake struck oil with a fairly primitive well.

  Like California’s gold rush, Pennsylvania’s oil boom brought a deluge of speculators to the area, and by the end of 1860, the neighborhood was sprouting oil wells. By 1865, a village originally called Cornplanter had grown into a muddy, ramshackle boomtown renamed Oil City. Suddenly there was a critical need for better transportation in yet another portion of Pennsylvania. Titusville, which had been a lumbering town, was forty miles from Erie and sixteen miles from Corry, which was served by the Sunbury & Erie Railroad (later the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad) and the Atlantic & Great Western Railway (later part of the Erie Railroad and, still later, the Erie Lackawanna). Both of these railroads, as well as any others that ran anywhere near oil country, quickly built branches to capture a new kind of freight.