Strasburg sensed disaster when the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad proposed a route that would miss the town by about four miles. Concerned citizens and their state representative petitioned the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1831 for authority to construct a railroad that would intersect the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad at Leaman Place, then the site of a hotel, alternatively spelled Leman or Lemon.
Passenger cars at the Strasburg Rail Road being readied for business.
In a history of the Strasburg Rail Road published in the Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society, Lester James Kiscaden speculates that the railroad was not completed immediately after its charter was granted in 1835, though its roadbed might have been graded around that time. In Kiscaden’s opinion, the Panic of 1837 impeded construction until a second Strasburg Rail Road was incorporated in 1851.
Trains actually ran on the Strasburg Rail Road during the 1850s, but the railroad never made much money, so it was sold at auction in 1861. A number of other owners operated the railroad until the middle of the twentieth century, mainly hauling freight. A trolley linking Strasburg with Lancaster drew its passenger business, while the speed of the trains operating on the Pennsy’s main line eliminated the need for travelers to ever experience Strasburg.
In 1957, after a series of storms severely damaged the line, its owners petitioned for abandonment. But Henry K. Long, a Lancaster industrialist, saved the railroad by organizing fellow rail fans to purchase and restore it. After going to considerable trouble to locate and clear tracks that had been buried in mud, the new owners put the Strasburg Rail Road back into passenger business in 1959, with a locomotive and a Reading passenger car. Business soared after 1960, when the owners purchased a steam locomotive.
The Strasburg Rail Road’s current fleet of steam locomotives and restored passenger cars include a dining car option, which my husband and I experienced for the first time in 2010. As soon as we boarded and found seats, I began to wonder exactly how the waitstaff was going to serve a carload of people an entire meal during a ride that lasted all of forty-five minutes. I expected someone to plop a boxed sandwich in front of me, but instead our server handed us menus. After we placed our orders, we turned our attention to the bucolic scenery, which had changed since our last ride only by the addition of the Amazing Maize Maze. It was a windy autumn day, and we could see the colorful bobbing flags of parties working their way through the tall cornstalks.
Lunch arrived, and my open-faced hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy was as “good and plenty” as one could expect in Dutch Country. Not only did we have enough time to eat, but we also had time to order dessert and pay by credit card. My only suggestion would be that because of the vibrating nature of the rolling stock, the waitstaff might offer lobster bibs and extra napkins to those who order the homemade soups.
Few visitors to Strasburg realize that the structures and vehicles that make up the modern Strasburg Rail Road are a conglomeration of artifacts from other railroads and sites that may be nothing like those that were operating in Strasburg during the nineteenth century. The Strasburg railroad station was originally built in East Petersburg in 1882 for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. The “J” switch tower west of the station was built in 1885 by the Cumberland Valley Railroad and preserved by the Lancaster Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. The railroad’s parlor car was rebuilt in 1988 from an open-platform coach. The president’s car was a genuine business car used by the president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which placed it in storage and eventually auctioned it. It has been part of the Strasburg Rail Road since 1964 and is also available for rides and charters.
The Strasburg Rail Road offers many special events all year long. Besides its Easter Bunny Train and Santa Express, it offers train robbery rides, murder mystery trains, and wine and cheese events. Around Veterans Day each fall, the railroad conducts its Trains and Troops event to honor all veterans and demonstrate the importance of railroads in all military conflicts since the Civil War.
The Strasburg Rail Road has been called one of the most successful excursion lines in the United States. It quickly brought other rail-themed attractions to the area, making Strasburg a late-twentieth-century mecca for rail fans and a welcome change for visitors to Amish country.
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
In the mid-1960s, shortly after the Strasburg Rail Road acquired its first steam engine, the Commonwealth was searching for a location for a new railroad museum that would be close to an operating railroad. Railroad museums were popular in Europe, and Pennsylvania at that time was celebrating its industrial heritage with other museums dedicated to the history of lumbering, coal mining, and agriculture. Altoona wanted the railroad museum, and Williamsport, Honesdale, and Mount Union also had been considered, but the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission decided on Strasburg, probably because the town was easily accessible from major cities and already a tourist destination, partially due to the success of the Strasburg Rail Road.
The collection at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania grew from an exhibition organized by the Pennsylvania Railroad at the New York World’s Fair in 1939–40. When the fair was over, the artifacts eventually made their way to a PRR engine house in Northumberland that was becoming an informal repository of historic trains. But before the rolling stock could be moved to Strasburg, the little town needed a proper place to display it. Commission administrators studied other railroad museums and finally approved plans for the first building in North America designed specifically as a railroad museum, which would interpret the history not only of the Pennsy, but of all railroads in the Commonwealth. Ground was broken in 1972 and the museum opened three years later, attracting more than three hundred thousand visitors in its first year of operation.
Although Pennsy equipment tends to dominate the vast main hall of this museum, there are also artifacts from other lines that operated in Pennsylvania, including the Western Maryland Railway, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, and the Cumberland Valley Railroad. While the large array of locomotives interests rail connoisseurs, everyone enjoys peering into the windows of the cars that offer a glimpse into railroad social life, such as the business car built for Carl Gray, president of the Western Maryland, with its elegant dining and observation area. The Lotos Club Pullman car, named after a club in New York, is equally luxurious. And an old Pennsy passenger coach brings back memories of the scratchy plush seats and “guillotine” windows that were part of a ride on the Paoli Local well into the 1970s.
Since it would be difficult to offer much in the way of railroad education in the echoing main hall, docents provide a personal touch at the museum’s Railway Education Center, where they use models to illustrate railroad technology. One working model of an early steam engine actually runs on the steam produced when paraffin is burned as fuel in its tiny engine. The museum also contains railroad-related artifacts other than trains, such as the statue of Alexander Cassatt salvaged from the Pennsylvania Station in New York. A collection of works of art including oil paintings by Grif Teller, known for his depictions of the Pennsylvania Railroad and its trains, has been installed in the second-floor gallery, where visitors can view special and changing exhibits.
In the fall of 2010, the museum’s new director, Charles Fox, discussed changes planned to take place over the next several years. While the museum’s cavernous main hall would retain its magnificence, updated exhibits will give visitors a better impression of what life was like for those who worked on or traveled by railroad. This includes incorporating more activity into the museum’s 1915 Golden Age of Railroading Street Scene, which consists of several building façades that visitors see upon entering the main hall. The museum will continue to do quality restorations, with the objective of restoring equipment to a condition where it has educational value, especially for younger visitors, who are the “future consumers of h
istory,” and not necessarily to operating condition. After all, those who want to see old equipment being operated can do so across the street at the Strasburg Rail Road. In general, there will be more opportunity for the kind of hands-on interactive experience that has proven to be so popular at the museum’s Railway Education Center. The plans also include construction of a sixteen-thousand-square-foot roundhouse on the museum’s existing 1928 Reading turntable in its outdoor storage yard. This would provide permanent indoor space for a number of historic locomotives that now sit outside, and which visitors often fail to seek out during inclement weather.
The magnificent Railroad Hall at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.
The turntable behind the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, soon to be the site of a roundhouse.
The Red Caboose Motel
Donald M. Denlinger, founder of the Red Caboose Motel and Restaurant, was often quoted as saying that he opened his establishment on a dare. In 1969, a friend dared him to bid on nineteen old cabooses being auctioned off by the Pennsy. His offer of $100 turned out to be the highest bid. He did not yet have the idea of turning them into a motel during the winter of 1970, when the Penn Central Railroad asked him to remove them from the siding in Paradise where they had been stored. He considered renting them at a campground he owned, then approached a bank, which provided him with funding for a caboose motel.
The Amish whose farms were located along the tracks of the Strasburg Rail Road were not about to sell or lease land for such an operation, but Denlinger was able to purchase a farm from a non-Amish couple who wanted to retire from farming. The Strasburg Rail Road assisted in getting the cabooses to his new property. Denlinger designed the caboose interiors, a process that involved locating furnishings that would fit or having the needed furniture custom-built. Success seemed assured on opening day in the spring of 1970, when forty-five hundred people showed up to get a look at the Red Caboose Motel.
Following a series of run-ins with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection over the levels of nitrate in its well water during the early 2000s, Denlinger sold the motel to Larry DeMarco of Philadelphia. DeMarco remodeled many of the cabooses and renovated the kitchen, reopening in 2005. Staffers at the front desk informed us that 2010 had been a good year, and the motel was expecting business to be equally good in coming years.
The Red Caboose Motel and its restaurant.
The caboose accommodations are behind the main building at the Red Caboose Motel.
The motel offers both family and couples accommodations. Many cabooses have microwave ovens and refrigerators, and the Honeymoon Caboose has a whirlpool bath and private deck. Guests can book a package that includes breakfast and dinner, including champagne. Elsewhere on the property are a playground, gift shop, petting zoo, and picnic areas. The motel’s restaurant is located in a restored rail coach and specializes in Pennsylvania Dutch family cooking made from products delivered from local Amish farms. The menu offers chicken pot pie and a dish that was a favorite in an earlier Pennsylvania, chicken and waffles. There are a number of amusing stories about tourists confusing the Red Caboose Motel’s “dining car” restaurant with the Strasburg Rail Road’s dining car.
Model Railroading in the Region
If you’re not embarrassed to visit a place called the Choo Choo Barn without a child in tow, you will see one of the state’s best model railroads open to the public on a regular basis. Located in a small strip mall just west of the Strasburg Rail Road, the building housing the display is adjacent to several specialty shops selling railroad books and videos, model railroading equipment, and locally crafted items, as well as a restaurant for those who spend the day.
The history of the Choo Choo Barn layout is a familiar one. George Groff of Strasburg originally set up a model train display in his basement for his kids, which grew along with his family. In the early 1960s, he moved the layout to a barnlike township maintenance building and opened it to the public with idea of making extra money to put his kids through college. In 1979, members of the second Groff generation took over as owners and operators of the Choo Choo Barn.
Most of the trains running in the Choo Choo Barn today are O gauge, but there are also trains of other gauges. Between the layout’s trains and its animations, more is going on at any given moment in the Choo Choo Barn than with most other model railroads I’ve seen. The Choo Choo Barn layout recreates the Lancaster County of the not-too-distant past. It includes replicas of buildings familiar to those who have traveled Lancaster Avenue to the city of Lancaster, such as the windmill-shaped Dutch Haven store and Dutch Wonderland, a low-key amusement park whose replica includes an operational monorail, just like the real thing. A Memorial Day parade marches through Strasburg, and a circus also has its own parade. An Amish barn raising is taking place, as well as something seen far more frequently today in Dutch Country: a yard sale. Periodically, the lights in the Choo Choo Barn dim, and the display’s building and vehicle lights come on.
The layout has a tiny park with a tiered memorial holding statues of U.S. presidents. I asked the friendly cashier whether a lifesize version of this monument existed anywhere outside of Choo Choo Barn world and was told that it does not. The lady also informed me that the memorial is missing several presidents, since the guy who made the models died during the administration of George H. W. Bush. My favorite part of the display is the recreation of the Strasburg Rail Road, whose steam locomotive switches from one end of the train to the other at each end of the ride, just as it does in the larger operation not far away. The Choo Choo Barn’s version of the Strasburg Rail Road train also passes a replica of the Red Caboose Motel.
Within walking distance of the real-life Red Caboose Motel is the National Toy Train Museum. You will find several model railroad layouts inside, but this really is a museum, just like the sign says. It’s also a valuable resource for those contemplating collecting their own trains and building their own layouts. The building is the national headquarters of the Train Collectors’ Association, founded in 1954 “to promote the growth and enjoyment of collecting and operating toy, model and scale trains.” The building was constructed in 1977 and designed to look like a Victorian-era train station, complete with a gingerbread cupola. Inside is the world’s most extensive collection of toy trains, with different layouts of various gauges, so if you don’t already know the difference between O and HO, you’ll see what it is here. In the G-scale exhibit, there’s a layout within the layout, which the museum calls Z scale. In some of the layouts, you can push a button and run a train.
The museum has many unique and valuable examples on display, including a miniature locomotive made in 1840 that runs on alcohol. Other toy trains date from the mid-1800s to the present day. Some exhibits are creatively arranged, like the window of “Harry’s Hardware,” which shows off model railroading materials the way they might have been displayed in a real storefront. The building also houses the Toy Train Reference Library, which contains more than seventeen thousand items to help rail fans acquire or repair model rolling stock, or appraise what they already have acquired or inherited.
In Mechanicsburg, the Keystone Model Railroad Historical Society has a model train layout called the Keystone Midland, which models an east-west route across Pennsylvania. The society sometimes hosts open houses in its clubhouse, which was once a power substation for a local trolley line. Each year, club members join with the Friends of Fort Hunter in Harrisburg to set up and run a popular modular layout at Fort Hunter called the Toy Train.
Railroad Artifacts of Greater Lancaster
The very first train to run from Columbia to Philadelphia on the old State Works came through the city of Lancaster, which in the early nineteenth century was Pennsylvania’s largest inland city, located in one of the Commonwealth’s most fertile belts of agricultural land. Imagine the furor of Lancaster’s citizens when the original route for this line was intended to bypass their city. It’s possible that plans were abruptly changed no
t only as a result of local outcry, but also because in 1828, organizers of the Baltimore & Susquehanna Rail Road, then in the planning stages, were considering York Haven as a destination, which threatened to pull Lancaster into Baltimore’s economic sphere.
By 1830, the Lancaster Journal was reporting on the remarkable railroad bridge being built over the Big Conestoga Creek, whose sixty-foot piers were purported to be the highest in the world constructed of rubble masonry. A second bridge, spanning the Little Conestoga, rose about forty feet above the water and stretched one thousand feet in length. The newspaper article notes that “these bridges are becoming objects of great curiosity and are now much visited.”
In his 1899 History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, William Bender Wilson included a drawing of Lancaster circa 1842 with a train moving through town on what would have been the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad.
About this time, the Pennsylvania Railroad was helping Lancaster become an industrial city, as well as an agricultural entrepôt. John Brandt Sr. operated the Lancaster Locomotive Works from 1853 to 1857, when the facilities were acquired by James A. Norris and later his brother Edward, who operated the Lancaster Locomotive and Machine Works from 1863 to 1868 in buildings along East Fulton Street between North Ann and North Plum Streets, adjacent to the Pennsy’s tracks. Here they made locomotives for a number of American railroads, including the Reading & Columbia.
Lancaster recently lost another artifact of its railroad heritage when its old stockyard, located near the Amtrak station, was torn down. The Lancaster Union Stockyard opened in 1895 on what was then the edge of town, a more formal successor to the animal pens that had long been springing up along the railroad tracks. By 1925, it had become the largest stockyard on the East Coast, where hundreds of thousands of animals were sold each year. Railroad officials operated the stockyard until 1972, when it was purchased by businessmen who formed Lancaster Stockyards Incorporated.
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