(The following article by Jerry L. Gleason was posted on the Patriot-News website on January 10.)
SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. — A long line of coal cars slowly moves out of the Enola Yard, headed for PPL’s Brunner Island coal-fired generating plant 15 miles down river.
Freight cars from hundreds of locations converge at the yard, laden with automobiles, chemicals, paper, lumber and forest products, sand and gravel, and manufactured goods.
The cars are separated, then rolled onto various tracks where yard workers assemble them into trains headed for a single destination or stops along the way.
The yard handles about 1,000 freight cars a day: Thirteen trains enter the yard and 13 depart for destinations throughout the East. Once nothing more than a rural outpost surrounded by farms and orchards, this expansive network of tracks, automated switches and control systems is one of the nation’s largest freight-classification yards. For the past 100 years, the Enola Yard has been a vital crossroads of U.S. commerce, often providing the most efficient way to move goods.
Enola is the “X” at the center of the Eastern railroad map.
“Traffic goes north, south, east, and west from here,” said Randy Fannon, Norfolk Southern district superintendent. “Enola is perfectly situated for the freight business we handle.”
Over the decades, the yard has carved out a community that to this day reflects the generations of men drawn there by jobs. Engineers, conductors, brakemen, maintenance and repair crews and wranglers followed in the footsteps of the thousands of Hungarian, Italian and other immigrants who in the early 20th century moved 13 million cubic yards of earth to level out the yard.
In the past 100 years, the yard and this West Shore community bore the onslaught of change — mechanical, technological and demographic — that alters the landscape.
Even now, 21 years after retiring, Bill Zeigler, a former Pennsylvania Railroad fireman and engineer, can look across the hill from his Enola home down to the yard and witness that change.
“I look over there every once in a while just to see what’s going on,” Zeigler said. “There isn’t as much going on as there used to be.”
Now, after years of decline, thanks to improvements and a changing economic climate, the yard is enjoying a resurgence.
The early days:
By the start of the last century, the industrial revolution had dramatically changed the nation. Cities and towns had mushroomed overnight. Skyscrapers grew, and one of the nation’s most vital transportation systems, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which linked the Northeastern United States with the Midwest and beyond, could barely meet the demands of the tremendous freight and passenger traffic.
“There were no good highways, the automobile was in its infancy, and everything moved by rail,” said Dan Cupper, a railroad and transportation historian.
The Pennsylvania Railroad saw a need.
It had expanded its main line from two tracks to six from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and to four tracks as far west as Chicago.
But an additional track was needed to handle the volume of traffic and to divide passenger and freight traffic onto separate lines.
In 1902, Enola was nothing more than a small railroad station surrounded by farms, orchards and a few scattered houses. That year, the railroad announced plans to build a freight-classification yard south of the station in East Pennsboro Twp. The project’s cost: $7 million.
The railroad began purchasing farmland to build the rail yard and the town that would house its workers. By February 1903, 3,000 men were at work constructing the rail yard.
The plan was for Enola to be “a model little town, with wide macadamized streets, sidewalks and pretty houses” lighted by electricity and supplied with mountain spring water.
No one could foresee its explosive growth.
Thousands of railroad workers, transferred from freight yards in Harrisburg, Marysville and Columbia, moved their families to Enola. Merchants, attracted by the growth, accompanied them.
But rents were high, and there were no schools, sidewalks, local fire protection, garbage collection or other services.
“At first, railroad workers didn’t want to transfer to Enola from Harrisburg,” said Herb Kruger, a local historian and president of the Historical Society of East Pennsboro. “They didn’t want to have to pay the 5-cent trolley fare to go to and from work. Once there was adequate housing in Enola, they began moving across the river.”
At its peak, the yard employed more than 2,000 workers.
In addition to the engineers, conductors and other rail workers, wranglers unloaded cattle in West Fairview. They fed and washed the animals, cleaned the cars and loaded the cattle again. In the summer, crews iced down lettuce, fruit and other produce. In the winter, they placed smudge pots in the cars to keep the produce from freezing.
Others worked in the roundhouse, servicing steam locomotives, or in the Steel Car Shop, building or repairing freight cars. In 1947, another repair shop was built to service the diesel and electric locomotives that were beginning to replace steam engines.
“Most of the people who worked at the yard had worked for the railroad at other locations,” Kruger said. “This was specialized work that required training.”
In 1950, the Pennsy’s board of directors decided to build the Conway Yard near Pittsburgh and consolidate its freight traffic there.
That was the beginning of Enola’s decline.
During that decade, the turnpike was completed. Highways connected cities, and more people could afford cars.
The final blow for Enola was the creation of Conrail in 1976, a merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and other bankrupt railroads. Traffic patterns changed when Conrail decided to move east-west freight on the Reading Railroad line and Enola was bypassed by much of the traffic.
Working at the yard:
Bill Zeigler’s first day of work at the Enola Yard was Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Diesel and electric locomotives were replacing steam engines.
Zeigler, a fireman, was responsible for returning his steam engine to the roundhouse, where it was serviced, ensuring that it had a full load of coal, and returning it to the departure track before heading out with a train of freight cars.
He later became an engineer on freight and passenger trains between Enola and New York City
“When you worked as a fireman on passenger runs into New York City, you were just about ready to be promoted to engineer, which was the prestige job on the railroad,” said Zeigler, who worked at the yard for a year, went into the Army and returned to the yard in 1946.
Unlike him, Ken England, a former Pennsylvania Railroad conductor and brakeman, spent all of his work hours at the yard.
England was responsible for making up trains, noting the numbers on the cars to put the right ones together, then getting them out on schedule.
“I liked the outdoor work, and it wasn’t overly supervised,” England said.
For Zeigler and England, and the tens of thousands of men employed at the yard in the past 100 years, the Enola Yard provided a livelihood — and a passion.
“There was a romance to steam and a feeling of power that didn’t exist with the other locomotives,” Zeigler said. “For one thing, steam was really dirty, and with diesel you didn’t have to take a bath and change your clothes the first thing when you got home.”
But the glamour and romance of a job at the yard had its downside.
“It was a dangerous job, and people would make a false step and get injured or killed,” England said. “When those big, heavy cars get moving, they aren’t going to stop just because you’re standing there.”
On June 19, 1943, on a day wrought with the news from the war front, Enola Yard workers processed 20,661 freight cars in a 24-hour period. It was the yard’s busiest day.
During Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972, the yard was isolated by high water. Many employees couldn’t get to work.
“I took a yard engine down the track to Wormleysburg and Lemoyne and picked up men who couldn’t get through the flooded roads,” Zeigler recalled. “They crawled up on the engine, and I brought them to work.”
England retired in 1989, Zeigler in 1984.
Enola and surrounding East Pennsboro are thriving communities. Like England and Zeigler, many of their residents are retired railroad employees, or their descendants.
Under the management of Norfolk Southern Corp., the Enola Yard is regaining prominence. Norfolk Southern has spent $21 million in the past three years to restore Enola as a classification yard and has installed automated switching and control systems.
Some 95 transportation employees, including engineers and conductors, work there. About 200 people work in the engine house, servicing diesel locomotives, and about 60 people work in the car shop. There are 25 maintenance employees.
Across the country, railroads are handling more tonnage than ever.
“Freight traffic is so heavy that there are too many trains to run the popular excursion trains through the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona,” Cupper said.
Meanwhile, the railroad is increasingly luring freight from the trucking industry.
“We can deliver reliable and consistent service, and that is more important to some shippers than speed,” said Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman.
For now, the long line of cars filled with coal — and myriad other goods — that pass through Enola will provide jobs for a new generation.
“It was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” England said.