The Reading
Railroad
Remember the Reading Railroad run by tycoons on the old
Monopoly
Board? Well, The Reading really existed. Pictured above is
a closeup of a Reading Railroad Stock Certificate that's part of my
collection. There are two more pictures below. In 1833, it
was called the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. It helped
create the Industrial Revolution. A 94-mile stretch of track
evolved, by the 1870s, into the largest corporation in the world.
Then, it got chopped up by the “real world” monopoly board (they
weren’t playing games). Then, it got patched back together in
smaller form again. In 1920, it was called “The Reading
Lines.” I started to list the little railroads that were included
in “The Lines,” but when I got to twenty three, I gave up. Rest
assured there were a lot of little railroads in Pennsylvania Dutch
country. A farmer might use one of those little railroads to hand
carry a couple bushels of tomatoes to market in Reading. A small
metalwork jobber in a little country blacksmith shop might use one to
ship a few forged parts to a larger factory in Reading where they’d be
assembled into something larger and shipped by another little Reading
Railroad Line to Philadelphia. I remember when the Reading Railroad
Tycoons
were still using Steam Engines that looked like little Models. The
Pennsylvania Dutch and the Reading Railroad go hand in hand in my
writings.
Here's a quotation from Further From the Middle. "After Arsenic, Randy,
and Ricky packed up at the cabin and took their morning ride to the
Grand Canyon and then down the mountain backroads, they ate lunch in a
small restaurant in the mountain community of Renovo near the
Susquehanna River. The inhabitants were mostly people of German
ancestry brought there by the Philadelphia and Sunbury Railroad before
it became the Philadelphia and Erie in 1861. Arsenic’s group sat near
the front window where they could look out across the remains of a
railroad. This whole side of town had once been a huge switching yard,
sometimes called a marshalling or classification yard. There was row
upon row upon row of laid track, and roundhouses for switching track,
and enormous maintenance shops where whole trains could be pulled under
a single roof. One small train was out there now where there had once
been dozens. It was adding a few cars before departing for
Philadelphia. During lunch, as though picking up on the topic of
discussion at the cabin from the previous evening, Arsenic lamented
changes that had occurred in his world and talked about how the
railroad yard outside the restaurant window was once filled with steam
engines chuffing back and forth as cars were added to a string, or
engines were switched from one string to another, until a train was
ready to head down to places like Reading and Philadelphia with loads
of coal or merchandise from small manufactories and farms. Arsenic said
sometimes, on cold days, the yard was like a scene from a nightmare,
full of steam and smoke. “Schmoke, schparks, an schteam from five to
ten locahmotiffs passin each anutter all at once’t as dey schtoped and
schtarted an schtoped again. Looked like fiah-breathin dragons. Chuff,
chuff, chuff, chuff! Dough's vere da days!” Originally, transportation
of people and goods had been carried out by horse and wagon and canal
and river. Like that branch of the Susquehanna River right close to
Renovo. But by 1915, Pennsylvania had completed 11,693 miles of
railway. The golden age of the locomotive had arrived. And then again
by the 1930’s, the truck, auto, and airplane were taking over, and the
railroads entered a long period of decline just like the horse, canal,
and river traffic did earlier. In 1941, the famous Pennsylvania
Turnpike opened. It’s ironic that this marvel of engineering with its
many tunnels through mountains was actually started as a railroad, a
railroad that ended up a big highway, like the rest of the nation.
See-- Further
From the Middle
Return
to Berks County
©2005