(Penn State Live posted the following article on its website on April 22.)
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Thirty years after its last train pulled away from here, the Bellefonte Central Railroad has made a return, of sorts, to the University Park campus.
Instead of boxcars on rails, the Bellefonte Central is now represented by boxes in the University Libraries’ Special Collection Library — 126 boxes packed with a wealth of archival materials that demonstrate the importance of the short line operation to Centre County from near the turn of the past century into the early 1980s.
Among other items, the remnants of the defunct railroad’s past now in the early stages of processing for eventual viewing by researchers and rail buffs include business and executive correspondence; financial materials such as accounting ledgers, stockholders’ certificates and shareholder’s files; employee records; labor-management relations records; and passenger, traffic, maintenance and accident data. University archivists and local historians hope that the collection — paired with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Central Region and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Pennsylvania Division records in the University Libraries — will put Penn State on track to be a center for regional transportation history.
According to James Quigel, head of the Historical Collections and Labor Archives in the University Libraries, “The priority and urgency attached to acquiring the Bellefonte Central collection was because of many people’s concerns that the materials had been in storage for decades in a building that could be easily broken into.”
That building, at the railroad’s shop and enginehouse in Coleville, just outside Bellefonte, was in such disrepair when archivists retrieved the collection “in the dead of January 2001,” as Quigel remembers it, that the team wore respirator masks for the two days of “very dirty work” needed. James Miller, the former railroad general manager who acted as custodian to the records, facilitated their legal transfer to the University late last year. That enabled the University to hire an assistant for the project, University of Pittsburgh library studies graduate student Tracy Maleeff, in February through a $15,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Michael Bezilla, director of advancement projects in the Office of University Relations, in his spare time is co-authoring a book about the Bellefonte Central. He has already used some of the records and helped arrange their acquisition by the University Libraries.
“The collection is probably one of the most complete documentations of the rise and fall of a short line railroad anywhere in the nation,” Bezilla noted. “These records are valuable to our understanding of Centre County and Penn State history, but they also allow us to examine — through the experience of the Bellefonte Central — the factors that influenced the growth, operation and decline of railroads in general.”
When everything is catalogued, the library will install an educational exhibit featuring documents and images from the collection to increase public awareness of it, said Jane Charles, an associate archivist with the University Libraries. “We’re also going to digitize portions of the collection so that they will be accessible on the Special Collections Library Web site.”
Bringing the latest archival technology to bear on oldest and most fragile of the records will safely allow modern historians to view, for instance, exchanges of correspondence from the early 1900s between Penn State President George Atherton and railroad managers regarding the timeliness, or lack thereof, of the University’s payments for freight services.
On its way to campus, the Bellefonte Central extended tracks 19.5 miles first to a station that was located roughly where the open stairway on College Avenue underneath Hammond Building currently can be found, and later (beginning in 1930), due to construction of the campus power plant, to what is now the bus station in State College. In addition to its bread-and-butter business of hauling lime and stone to the Pennsylvania Railroad connection in Bellefonte, it provided passenger and freight service for the “town and gown” up until 1974, although from 1946 on, it was only occasional excursions on football weekends that brought any passengers at all to town on the train.
For more information on the Bellefonte Central Railroad, visit http://bellefonte.com/heritage/BCR/