Steam in the Poconos

One of the many rail lines that crisscrossed northeastern Pennsylvania to get from New York City to Buffalo was that of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, otherwise known as the DL&W or Lackawanna. It was a coal hauling line, and was so prosperous early in the 20th Century that it undertook a line relocation with fills, cuts, tunnels and massive concrete viaducts that I have previously blogged. The DL&W was one of the major players in that market, along with the New York Central and Pennsylvania. Unlike the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the DL&W (merged with the Erie in 1960) made money into the 1970s. A hurricane in 1972 which destroyed major parts of the line finally drove it into bankruptcy, and it became part of Conrail in 1976.

As with the Lehigh, large segments of trackage were made redundant by the Conrail merger. One of those  was the mainline from Scranton, Pennsylvania over the Pocono Mountains. This included the line's major maintenance facility in Scranton. The line and facility might have been scrapped like so much of the rest of the rail infrastructure in the northeast, were it not for Steamtown.

Steamtown was a small, privately run organization located in the wilds of Vermont, far from any major population centers. They had operable steam locomotives and rolling stock, and ran excursions. Thier location was against them, as it was so far out of the way that few people came to ride. By the middle 1980s they were looking for a new home, somewhere closer to the population centers of the Boston - New York - Philadelphia - Washington corridor. Scranton was in the right place, and had the extant rail facilities, including a mainline on which to run excursions.

By the early 1990s a combination of things happened that resulted in the National Park Service taking over the operation, and it became the Steamtown National Historic Site. An influx of money enabled the rebuilding of the historic roundhouse, and construction of a visitor center and interpretive center. NPS funded rebuilding the mainline up into the Poconos to Tobyhanna for excursion use.

In the winter of 1996, the Milwaukee Road #261 was leased by the park to power a series of fall and winter trips. The winter trips were highly unusual for a steam locomotive, and I eagerly looked forward to them. The trips were scheduled for late February, which normally means a LOT of snow on the ground in Pennsylvania. Watching the big steamer blast through snowdrifts would have been a real treat! Of course this year it decided to warm up, and by trip time there was little left on the ground. But then it turned cold. When the weekend of the trip arrived, it was bitter. My buddy and I both froze our cameras, not to mention ourselves, when we got off for the photo runbys.

It was worth it, to see big steam in the winter.

The 261 exiting nay Aug Tunnel, just out of Scranton.



Another shot from that trip: