The Railroad That Never Was: Vanderbilt, Morgan, and the South Pennsylvania Railroad

Introduction

1 J O U S P E V $U J P O Drive the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the Alleghenies, and you will be touched by a ghost the entire way. You will catch it briefly in the remaining tunnels, but elsewhere along the highway it hides well, showing itself only fleetingly and then only if you know when and where to look. It is always close by, though, usually lurking beneath the trees and undergrowth. It is a phantom , to be sure, but one with solid form—high earth embankments and deep cuts through the forbidding terrain, and small stone bridges and culverts lost in deep backwoods. Now mostly engulfed by nature or intermittently paved over, these are the tangible remains of what was once heralded as one of the boldestandmostdaringrailroadprojectsofitstime:a208-mile-longmainline railroad that would blast its way through the Alleghenies over a route that earlier surveyors and engineers had despaired of, producing the shortest line betweenPittsburghandtheEastCoast.Itisalsoaghostwiththebestofbreeding , fathered in the early 1880s by a distinguished roster of capitalists with nameslikeWilliamH.Vanderbilt,AndrewCarnegie,JohnD.Rockefeller,and Henry Clay Frick. It was designed and built by some of the best engineers in the business and finally put to an uneasy rest by J. Pierpont Morgan in one of the more legendary episodes of Gilded Age finance. Its formal name was the South Pennsylvania Railroad, usually simply shortened to the “South Penn.” But mention the South Penn today, even to many serious railroad historians, and the best you may get is a noncommittal mumble or a quizzical stare. Even the few who do connect usually think of it The Railroad That Never Was 2 only as the foundation for the country’s first long-distance superhighway and know little more. Yet this impossible railroad, which was to form a new trunk line between Pittsburgh and the East, came close to overcoming its innumerable obstacles. And even after it was declared dead, it continued breathing at least a quarter of a century longer. AlthoughtheSouthPenn’sgenesisdatedtothelate1830s,anditscorporate identitytothemid-1850s,itsreallifebeganin1881.ThatyearVanderbilt’sagents acquired the charter and corporate shell of a moribund company with a misbegotten past and seemingly no future. Vanderbilt then promptly dispatched surveyors through Pennsylvania’s rugged “southern tier” to plot the path of a double-track mainlineconnecting Pittsburgh withHarrisburg, Pennsylvania, forming a bridge between the Midwest and the large industrial and population centers in eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York Harbor. At its west end, the Vanderbilt-controlled Pittsburgh & Lake Erie would feed traffic from Pittsburgh, the upper Ohio River valley, and Youngstown; from Cleveland and Youngstown, his Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway would provide traffic access to the New York Central system’s entire midwestern network reaching to Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. At Harrisburg, the Philadelphia and Reading, along with its affiliated Central Railroad of New Jersey, would provide access to the northeastern markets. And along its own line, coal and coke traffic would flow from the western Pennsylvania mines and ovens and, through connections, from the Broad Top fields. But also along that line were the most challenging barriers any railroad surveyor could imagine. It would need to cross six major mountain ridges and their intervening valleys. Yet, to be competitive, its ruling grades had to be held to a relatively gentle 1 percent, requiring creative engineering and heavy construction. That would include drilling nine tunnels, four of them about a mile long. Nonetheless it was thought to be worth it. The new railroad would break the near-monopoly of the arrogant, all-powerful Pennsylvania Railroad in Pittsburgh, open new markets for Vanderbilt’s railroads and for the Reading, and lead to lower freight rates and better negotiating leverage both for Pittsburgh ’s coal and steel industrialists and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil interests. Initial enthusiasm was high as a select coterie of wealthy investors banded together to finance and build the railroad entirely by themselves, with no outsiders welcome. In truth, though, they were on a quixotic quest—some even said a lunatic venture. (“Vanderbilt’s Folly,” some called it.) Even as wagonloads of laborers, tools, and supplies flooded into the remote mountains to begin their work, Introduction 3 Wall Street was beginning to have second thoughts about the orgy of redundantrailroadconstructionthengoingonnationwide .True,thefinancierswere profiting handsomely from all the new securities issues, but the effects of too much competition against too much sunk capital were beginning to hurt their investors. The South Penn was...