Burgeoning PA short line serves up delightful excursions. Could it become a bigger passenger carrier?

On any given day, one could have awoken in the small city of Pottsville, nestled in the Appalachian hills of east-central Pennsylvania, walked down to Union Station, and climbed aboard a train for a three-hour ride along the wooded shores of the Schuylkill River into Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal. The train would have been a service of the Reading Company, later Conrail and later the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). From the 1950s till its demise in 1981, one would have made the comfortable trip aboard a two-car set of Budd Rail Diesel Cars (RDCs), half of one of which would have been a bar and dinette.

Fast forward to 2014. Regularly-scheduled passenger train service over this entire route (except for SEPTA Regional Rail service from Center City Philadelphia to Norristown) has been absent for 32 years, but the tracks serving Pottsville are part of a successful regional railroad called the Reading, Blue Mountain and Northern, or Reading & Northern (R&N) for short. The railroad, profiled in the June 2008 issue of Trains, carries several types of commodities for on-line customers and interchanges cars with Norfolk Southern at Reading six days a week and at Penobscot seven days a week. But perhaps more remarkable is what the R&N has invested into excursion passenger service, operated under the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway (LGSR) name.

On a cloudless and chilly Saturday morning, November 15, I arose at a Pottsville hotel, walked two blocks south to Union Station (reopened as a hub for the Schuylkill County bus system, as well as intercity buses, in June 2011), and boarded a special train bound for the North Reading yard. The consist was to have been the R&N’s two Budd RDCs that are original to the route and which the R&N acquired from Conrail, which still owned them despite SEPTA having operated them. However, the work necessary to restore them from three decades of mothballs had taken longer than expected, and they were not ready in time for this trip. 

The RDCs, nos. 9166 and 9168, are still in the shop in Port Clinton, PA. 9166 has the bar/dinette area along with coach seating, while 9168 is entirely coach seating. The Schuylkill Public Area Rapid Transit Authority tried to purchase the RDCs from SEPTA after 1981, but lack of funding prevented this, so they remained the property of Conrail (which took over the bankrupt Reading’s lines in 1976), which R&N owner Andrew Muller Jr. acquired in 1991.

Instead, two GP39 diesels pushed three red-liveried ex-Lackawanna commuter coaches and a head-end power car onto the one-remaining stub-end track at Pottsville Union Station. (What was once a series of terminal tracks and platforms is now a parking lot, with one track cut into the pavement remaining.) Both the Reading Company and Pennsylvania Railroad once terminated passenger trains here, originally at separate stations. The first trip to depart here since Union Station’s reopening after an $18 million renovation (when the reopening ceremonies were accompanied by a special train trip) was on September 21, 2014. It ran the same itinerary with the same equipment as the Nov. 15 trip, and carried local dignitaries. That trip, as did Saturday’s, included a stop in Port Clinton (roughly halfway between Pottsville and Reading) for a tour of the R&N’s headquarters and shops. 

More of my photos from Saturday’s excursion are in this Flickr album.

The ride was very pleasant and perfectly paced at a nearly consistent 30 mph over a single-track line consisting of a mix of jointed and continuously welded rail. It offered glimpses of peaceful late fall forests narrow valleys cut by the Schuylkill more intimately than can be experienced from parallel State Route 61. We passed through the charming small towns of Schuylkill Haven (with its original stone Reading depot standing sentinel), Landingville, Auburn, Hamburg, Shoemakersville, Leesport and North Reading. And we witnessed rolling fields of corn and wheat dotted with houses and barns. My fellow passengers ranged widely in age and included many families with children, along with a small poodle (the LGSR does allow well-behaved dogs on most of its excursions). Sandwich lunches from an Italian restaurant in Tamaqua, included in the $24.00 ticket price, were handed out at the North Reading yard, where our twin green-and-yellow-liveried Geeps, nos. 2530 and 2531, ran around the train on a siding.

Muller, the railroad’s owner, grew up a railfan, and entered the business as the designated operator for a consortium of five shippers who purchased a line in the former Reading Company service area. He later brought together several disparate short lines, and purchased the Reading Cluster (a substantial chunk of the former Reading Lines north of Reading) from Conrail in 1990.

Muller oversaw the design and construction of the Port Clinton headquarters buildings. The main office building is based on the design of the Reading’s Catawissa Station, and the annex is modeled after the original Port Clinton switch tower. The train shed next to the main building is modeled after one that once stood in Columbia, PA. The ornate Board room in the annex building contains many items from Muller’s personal model train collection, with a working model train loop around the top, as well as some railroadiana, plus model airplanes, another of Muller’s hobbies. On the Board room’s ceiling is a painting of the current R&N system map: over 300 track miles serving nine counties. The former Board room in the main building houses two large working model steam locomotives.

The Geeps powering our run were ex-Santa Fe GP30s. They are usually used for freight service and have only hauled one or two excursions previously. The 1923-built coaches, which once made the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western commuter runs out of Hoboken Terminal, are housed in Port Clinton. They have also carried leaf peepers very popular fall foliage trips from Port Clinton to Jim Thorpe, PA, each October for 20 years. Most of the LGSR’s trips, however, operate out of Jim Thorpe, 31 miles east of Pottsville, and use former Reading and Central of New Jersey coaches.

The R&N’s car shop employs a small and fluctuating number of welders/mechanics and utility men to repair and inspect (once every seven months for freight cars; once annually for passenger cars) the railroad’s entire fleet of over 1,100 freight cars of many types, plus 19 coaches, one head-end power car, and four private passenger cars. This crew also converted three coaches into open-air cars for the regular LGSR excursions.  

The jewel of the R&N’s locomotive shop, of course, was its sole operating steam locomotive, 4-6-2 light Pacific no. 425. It will pull several of the R&N’s Santa Trains starting after Thanksgiving, which will depart from four towns on the system. “The passenger department is more popular than ever,” our tour guide said.

When I asked him what the biggest obstacles to operating regular intercity service over their lines would be, R&N Passenger Administrator Matt Fisher told me that the railroad is more focused on tourist business, and that no intercity operations are discussed at this time. “We like working with the towns and doing things differently.” From Thanksgiving weekend through December, the LGSR will operate Santa Trains every weekend day, and there will continue to be opportunities for people to enjoy rides on “The Road of Anthracite” (a moniker borrowed from the Lackawanna of yore), winding through the east-central Pennsylvania hills. 

It will take the efforts of roads like the R&N that have an innovative spirit and a positive attitude to break down the barriers — primarily financing and the cost of liability protection — to the revitalization of regional passenger train networks providing a lifeline to places like Pottsville. As such smaller railroads continue to see growth in excursion passenger traffic, I would expect the desire for more regularly-scheduled service to grow. Let’s hope that regional railroads are ready to start becoming people movers again.