Join me for a ride on Amtrak's rare mileage excursion in Pennsylvania

We’re on Platform 7 at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station at 8 a.m. on Sunday, Nov 3. In front of us is one of the biggest Amtrak trains I’ve ever seen: 16 cars -- four Amfleet and nine Horizon coaches plus two cafe cars and office car No. 9800 bringing up the markers. On the point are Phase III P42 Heritage unit No. 145 and P40 No. 822, properly positioned back to back. The occasion is the second of two Amtrak Autumn Express (the first ran yesterday) excursions to Harrisburg and back the long way, via Perryville, Md. and the sprawling Enola Yard, and we’ve got our tickets. 

Folks had started lining up on the concourse before eight, and Amtrak, in its wisdom, started the boarding process well ahead of the 9 a.m. departure, filling the coaches from front to back, thus ensuring that those who wanted to sit together could. We find a spot about six rows back in car No. 82772, securing a window and aisle seat together (Roy to keep tabs on the scenery, my wife Laura to tend to her knitting) on the left side of the train, the better to see the Susquehanna River in all its fall glory for the entire 68-mile trek from Perryville to Rockville, Pa. (The scenery did not disappoint.) 

We pull promptly at the schedule time and are up to track speed by the time we pass under Septa’s Airport Line just three miles out. Our car host, Jody, is a 30-year Amtrak veteran who works the long-distance train fleet desk at Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operations Center in Wilmington, Del. She and her car-host peers (also veteran Amtrak staffers in Philadelphia and Wilmington) are decked out in blue T-shirts with AMTRAK STAFF in big yellow letters on the back and first names in small, tidy script on the front. Operations Center Director Bruce Van Sant provides an entertaining and educational commentary over the entire trip.

At 10:05 a.m. we stop briefly at Perryville, MP 59.4 to pick up our NS train and engine crew for the trek up the former Pennsylvania Railroad Port Road to Harrisburg and back over freight-only trackage between Columbia and Lancaster, Pa. It’s a progressive move off four-track in the northeast quadrant of the interchange, and starting here the colors and the river view are superb. The Susquehanna River is more than a mile wide for much of our run toward Columbia, showing a deep blue-green under cloudless skies, and the warm yellow, orange and peach fall foliage is spectacular.

By comparison, the former New York Central passenger line up the east side of the Hudson is tame: Three power plants, rapids, the narrows, three short tunnels, three flumes carrying streams over the tracks so they could dump into the river without washing out the right-of-way after heavy rains. 

We’re reminded once again at CP Port, MP 39.7 from Perryville, how the PRR went to great lengths to keep passenger and freight trains apart. Here the freight-only Atglen & Susquehanna branch came in (it was abandoned in the late 1980s and is now a bike trail) from Parkesburg, where it leaves the Phila-Harrisburg passenger main, running into Enola from the South. Mile posts switch at this point to miles from Parkesburg.

At Columbia, we meet an east-bound Bakken crude oil train holding for us. He’s en route to the Delaware City Refinery south of Wilmington. Ten miles further on we cross the Susquehanna on the Shocks Mill Bridge, a stone-arch affair dating from the early 1900s with a rebuilt center section thanks to Hurricane Agnes in 1972.

Next in view is the Harrisburg skyline across the river, with the Pennsylvania Capitol Building’s dome clearly visible. About now we begin to feel peckish, and tuck into our box lunches (included in the ticket price and which Jody cheerfully hands around) of turkey hoagies, chips, a chocolate chip cookie, and an apple, thoughtfully packed in souvenir swag, an insulated lunch bag with the Amtrak Inaugural Autumn Express logo.

We thread our way between miles of waiting manifest freight trains on the west side of the storied Enola yard, where I had photographed the last of PRR steam in 1956. We emerge adjacent to the westbound departure yard, with two NS freights queued up to go, pass the eponymous Bridge View Inn, a train-watcher’s heaven at water’s edge by the Rockville Bridge, and onto the bridge itself.

We stop for ten or so minutes while Bruce tells us what to look for, upstream and down. To the north is the Dauphin Narrows, a scenic water gap with the towns of Dauphin on the eastern shore and Marysville on the west. The nineteenth-century Dauphin-to-Marysville railroad bridge was replaced by the Rockville Bridge at the turn of the 20th century; one of the remaining piers now holds a quirky 25-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty, originally constructed of Venetian blinds.

We take our photographs and return to our seats as the engineman notches out for the run through Harrisburg Station. We pass CP Rockville where the Buffalo Line comes in from the left and the site of what was, back in the day, the elegant Rockville Tower.

Norfolk Southern’s Harrisburg Intermodal facility fills the landscape east of the main for most of the five miles to the Harrisburg station. As an NS stockholder, I’m pleased to see most of the double-stack platforms with double-stacks in them. Few “voids” here. 

Ten miles more (running not on the Keystone Corridor but on parallel NS freight-only tracks) and we’re in Middletown, home of the Middletown & Hummelstown, an 11-mile short line offering common carrier freight and passenger excursions. For a few moments we’re on Amtrak’s Keystone Corridor, a joint Penn DOT-Amtrak effort, upgraded for speeds of more than 100 miles an hour and seeing 14 round trips a day between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, including the state-funded “Pennsylvanian” with through service between New York and Pittsburgh. 

Right after Middletown we’re back on NS for the freight-only, rare mileage, Royalton Branch. We get an up-close and personal view of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and shortly rejoin the Port Road at CP Shocks where we retrace our earlier route as far as Columbia, turning away from the river and onto the even rarer mileage of the NS Columbia Secondary Track over to Lancaster, 12 miles. It’s a leisurely ride passing through back yards, past small town main streets, and clicking over the turnouts to numerous small feed mills and manufacturing firms.

We rejoin the Keystone Corridor at Cork Interlocking, and after saying a fond farewell to our NS crew — the whole car applauds — we hustle back to Philadelphia, pulling in at 4:10 p.m., exactly 20 minutes ahead of the advertised.

This was a successful trip, to say the least. We’d forgotten how pleasant is just to sit there and let the scenery roll by. No destinations or meetings at the other end of the ride, no iPhones or emails, just 800 or so of new best friends for the day. And of the 224 miles traversed, 101 are on rare, freight-only mileage. We’re ready to sign up for the next outing in a heartbeat.