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    Reading Trains and Trolleys
    Reading Trains and Trolleys
    Reading Trains and Trolleys
    Ebook162 pages46 minutes

    Reading Trains and Trolleys

    By Philip K. Smith and Historical Society of Berks County

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    About this ebook

    Rail transportation has been part of daily life in Reading since the 1830s. Reading Trains and Trolleys portrays the good old days of the Philadelphia & Reading Railway (reorganized as the Reading Company in 1923), the Schuykill Valley Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Mount Penn Gravity Railroad, the Neversink Mountain Railroad, the Reading City Passenger Railway, and the Reading Traction Company. The Reading Railroad gained widespread recognition as a property for sale on the Monopoly board, but the history of trains and trolleys in Reading goes well beyond that iconography. Reading Trains and Trolleys documents the impact of railroad and trolley networks on Reading and adjoining communities, including photographs of the interior of the locomotive shop and the carbarn at Tenth and Exeter Streets, views of the Walnut Street yard before and after the Outer Station was constructed, and views from the Swinging Bridge, which spanned the yard by the Outer Station. The Historical Society of Berks County's collection of rail photographs includes many never-before-published images of diverse scenes in and around Reading.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 16, 2004
    ISBN9781439631805
    Reading Trains and Trolleys
    Author

    Philip K. Smith

    Philip K. Smith grew up in the village of Berne along the main line of the Reading Company. He is a member of the Hawk Mountain Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society and the Train Collectors Association. He has written and edited Greenberg's guides for toy trains as well as articles for The Historical Review of Berks County, O Gauge Railroading, and Classic Toy Trains.

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    • 4/5
      Philip K. Smith has used the massive photo collection of railroads and trolleys from the Historical Society of Berks County along with his historical introduction to rail in the Reading/Berks County area of Pennsylvania. The photos, in black and white, cover engines and other equipment, stations, railroad yards, and people of the Philadelphia & Reading Railway (later the Reading Railroad of Monopoly fame) as well as trolleys that served the city and surrounding area. Instead of chronological order, Smith arranges his material into topics with excellent captions. Although George and Gloria Jean Meiser do cover railroads in their multivolume The passing scene, the pictures are scattered among the twenty or so volumes and many of these photos were not used by the Meisers.This book gives a sense of what it was like to ride the Reading and currently to ride the tourist Wanamaker, Kempton & Southern Railroad (the Hawk Mountain line) and the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway with its fall leaf rambles from Port Clinton to Jim Thorpe. It brought back memories of riding the Reading to Philadelphia during the Christmas holiday season when I was a child, leaving from the elegant Franklin Street Station. I was also fortunate in the fifties to be able to ride one of the last surviving trolleys on Penn Street.There is no bibliography and this book does not replace the definitive 2 volume set by Jim Holton, The Reading Railroad or the many books on the history of railroads by Benjamin Bernhart but it is a good place to start and is an enjoyable way to pass an afternoon.

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    Reading Trains and Trolleys - Philip K. Smith

    history.

    INTRODUCTION

    Long ago, a large fishing village occupied the foot of today’s Penn Street. Nearby was a natural ford that provided a great fishing spot. The Tulpehocken Path crossed that ford on its way from Philadelphia to Shamokin, through the Endless Mountains to the Iroquois stronghold in New York. Conrad Weiser lived by that path at Womelsdorf and used it for 30 years in negotiations with the Iroquois and the Lenape until his death in 1760. Chief Menangy of the Schuylkill clan of the Lenape had used the adjacent Perkiomen Path to attend treaty conferences with William Penn in Perkasie in 1683. Such accessibility attracted land speculators and a few early settlers. They prompted William Penn’s son Thomas to locate Reading on a piece of land in a very good Situation, as he wrote to his brother John in 1739.

    The next transportation milestones were the Schuylkill Canal (1825) and the Union Canal (1827). Constructed to keep the Erie Canal from enriching New York Harbor at the expense of Philadelphia, they linked Reading with Pottsville, Philadelphia, and Middletown-Harrisburg. Canals achieved remarkable efficiency. One or two horses (or mules) could haul 35 tons in a single boat, far beyond the capacity of any other form of land transportation. Both canals were rebuilt for greater capacity, and the Schuylkill Canal could eventually accommodate 200-ton boats. The speed was four miles per hour—walking speed—as it had always been for land transportation. But the Philadelphia & Reading Railway (P&R) was built to do better than that.

    Chartered on April 4, 1833, the P&R was constructed for steam locomotives. The first were imported from England. Then, American manufacture started. When the P&R was completed to Philadelphia (1838) and extended to Pottsville (1841), trips between those cities took a few hours instead of a few days. Shops that repaired those locomotives began to build them. Freight cars and passenger cars were maintained and built in shops of their own. Progress made headlines in Reading and beyond. Crossing Pennsylvania by a series of canals, railroads, and inclined planes required a week. Completion of Horse Shoe Curve and a troublesome tunnel at Gallitzin (1854) provided an all-rail route and cut that time to 24 hours. The Golden Spike linked Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento, California, 15 years later. An all-rail route across America enabled trains to cross the whole country in 10 days, then in 5 days. Reading, railroads, and America grew up together.

    By the 1860s, Reading had a population of 30,000. Street railways were proposed for transportation to downtown stores, factories throughout the city, and recreational areas. In 1865, the Reading City Passenger Railway Company was incorporated but wilted from lack of support. In 1873, two companies were incorporated almost simultaneously: a new Reading City Passenger Railway Company (RCPRC) and a Penn Street Passenger Railway Company. Both began construction and scheduled completion in 1874. The RCPRC laid track on Sixth Street from Canal Street to Robeson and Charles Evans Cemetery. The RCPRC also held the rights for the Penn Street line that operated from Front Street to 11th Street and then down Perkiomen Avenue to 19th Street. That line did not earn a profit, so it was sold to the Perkiomen Avenue Passenger Railway Company in 1881. As Reading’s population grew, both companies expanded as demand for transportation increased. By 1885, 36 cars and 112 horses served most of the city. In Richmond, Virginia, a new transportation era was dawning.

    Born in Connecticut in 1857, Frank J. Sprague was a mathematics whiz at age 16 and graduated with high honors from Annapolis Naval Academy at 21. After his first cruise, at the naval torpedo station in Newport, Rhode Island, his thoughts turned to electric transportation. Leo Daft, Charles J. Van Depoele, and Thomas Edison had made progress. Sprague’s great innovation placed two motors in one truck in wheel-barrow fashion. Each motor was supported by an axle and by a spring mount on the truck frame. His motors could safely bounce over bumps and keep sturdy, simple drive gears engaged.

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