STEWARTSTOWN, Pa. (WHTM) — It’s far from Pennsylvania’s only historic railroad, but it might be the only one that snakes through the front and back yards on homes — and certainly the only one so famous for doing so that it’s the subject of a four-minute film called (what else?) “There’s a Train in My Yard!”
The Stewartstown Railroad, which runs 7.4 miles through southern York County from its eponymous borough west to New Freedom, turns 140 years old Saturday.
First, the bad news: $1.40 train ride tickets to celebrate are — perhaps not surprisingly — sold out. But trains run most weekends through the fall — and yes, they run through the yards that made the railroad famous.
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“I’ve had some people who — they tell me they buy houses because it’s on a railroad track,” said Dee Bush, a volunteer who manages railroad ticket sales, among other things.
A minority of homeowners are said to be less thrilled with the arrangement. But the railroad was there before anyone alive today. Surviving paperwork addresses all kinds of important considerations — “you know, like what happens if the train hits a cow,” said David Williamson, the railroad’s president — who, like everyone working on the railroad nowadays, is a volunteer.
Williamson did earn some actual money from the Stewartstown in 1984, while he was in college, when he took a job driving spikes into the ground to help restore the railroad, which fell into disuse after Hurricane Agnes floodwaters in 1972 destroyed tracks on the other side of New Freedom.
“And they just said, ‘You know, we don’t really need this line anymore,’” Bush explained. “So that basically landlocked us.”
Previously, the railroad had served places like a lumber yard, a canning plant and a furniture factory that later closed but became newly famous earlier this year when a massive fire destroyed it.
“A lot of us in the railroad just kind of had a sinking feeling, because we have a history with that building,” Bush said. “And just to see it go, it was terrifying.”
Jim Tapley of Cockeysville, Maryland, is the railroad’s operations coordinator. Tapley organizes and trains crews.
“I’m a train guy. I’ve loved trains since I was a little boy. I’m the one who never outgrew it,” Tapley said.
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Because Stewartstown never reconnected to the national rail network after 1972, rides now — sometimes with seats on a working coach that’s 102 years old — are purely for rail enthusiasts and other tourists.
“We get grandparents bringing their grown children with the grandchildren, and [the grandparents] used to bring their children on this train years ago,” Tapley said.
“It’s a very scenic ride, up and down through the woods, through the fields and” — of course — “through the neighborhoods,” Williamson said.
“And it’s not just Stewartstown history, Pennsylvania history,” Bush said. “It’s American history. Railroads built the United States.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-06 11:07:00
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