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

9 The Second Front

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' 'S S P P O O U U The South Penn was surely the most dramatic and expensive element in William Vanderbilt’s war with the Pennsylvania. But as the South Penn’s contractors were blasting through the mountains, he, Franklin Gowen, and General George J. Magee of the Fall Brook Coal Company were also invading Pennsylvania Railroad territory in the even wilder northern part of the state. The project started off as a joint venture between Vanderbilt and the coal operators in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, particularly General Magee’s huge Fall Brook company and its associated railroads that he had inherited from his family and greatly expanded on his own. (The “General” title came not from any genuine military service but from a political appointment in 1869 as paymaster general for New York State.) Vanderbilt’s railroad was concerned about a reliable steam locomotive fuel supply, and the mine owners needed a cheaper outlet. ThenorthernPennsylvaniaincursionisitsowncomplexstorywithmostly its own cast of characters, not the least of which was General Magee, who became a close Vanderbilt ally and a South Penn investor. It had almost nothing in common with the South Penn except that it formed the second prong of a two-front Vanderbilt attack into PRR territory in the state and another collaboration with Gowen to help the Reading break out of its eastern Pennsylvania box. Although its full history is a sidestep from the South Penn story, some essentials must be told. The Second Front 77 276 dpi This 1940s company map shows the Vanderbilt-Magee-Gowen strategy for connecting the New York Central’s main line (upper right at Lyons, N.Y.) with the Clearfield coalfields (lower left, via the Beech Creek R.R.), and forming an East Coast connection with the Reading at Williamsport, Pennsylvania (lower right). New York Central. The Railroad That Never Was 78 During the 1870s, a chain of rail lines had been extended south from the New York Central’s main line at Lyons, New York, through Corning, and into the Tioga County coal country. Vanderbilt and Magee then swallowed up an uncompleted line initially called the Jersey Shore, Pine Creek & Buffalo Railway —later simply the Pine Creek Railway. This had been a Reading-backed project that was to run from a Reading connection at Newberry Junction, Pennsylvania—about3mileswestofWilliamsport—directtoBuffaloviaPort Allegheny, giving the Reading a Great Lakes outlet. As seemed to be usual, though, the Reading lacked the resources to complete it and local contributions were sparse. After Vanderbilt and Magee picked it up in the early 1880s, they changed its route to run north from Newberry Junction to their own existing Tioga County tracks near Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. As completed in June1883,thePineCreekbeganatNewberryJunctionontheeast,followedthe Susquehanna west to Jersey Shore, then turned northward through sparsely The Vanderbilt-Magee “Pine Creek” line passed through this kind of rugged wilderness en route, now advertised as “The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania.” Author’s collection. The Second Front 79 populatedcountry,passingthroughthespectacularPineCreekGorge(“Pennsylvania ’s Grand Canyon”) to a junction with another Vanderbilt-Magee line at Stokesdale, just northwest of Wellsboro. Through other affiliated lines, the route continued north through Corning to the New York Central’s main line at Lyons, about midway between Syracuse and Rochester. The result was a Vanderbilt-controlled through line from its upstate New York main line to Williamsport, with the Reading then providing access to its anthracite territory and markets in eastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey. For its part, the Reading got a northern and western outlet for its anthracite coal and the ability to handle midwestern grain traffic, albeit over a more roundabout route than it had originally planned. Its virtue, however, was that regardless of the South Penn’s fate, the Reading now had a live link to the outside world in the west. And indeed, as it developed in later years, the Newberry Junction gateway became the New York Central’s heaviest interchange point with a single railroad.1 No sooner was the Pine Creek in business than the Magee-VanderbiltGowen alliance went to work on a corporately separate branch line called the Beech Creek, Clearfield & South Western, running southwest from the Pine Creek at Jersey Shore into the Clearfield bituminous coalfields—heretofore primarily PRR territory and rich territory at that...