(The following story by Diane Stoneback appeared on The Morning Call website on August 30, 2009.)
SCRANTON, Pa. — Walk into the working rail yard at Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton and all the stories you have read about trains, from The Little Engine That Could to Thomas the Tank Engine tales, morph into reality.
Gray smoke curls from the stack of a huge black engine and clouds of white steam shroud its drive wheels as it slowly pulls out of its roundhouse stall, onto a 90-foot-long turntable and then onto running tracks.
Bells ring. Whistles blow. And the ground trembles as a locomotive weighing 440,000 pounds passes by.
As you breathe in the pungent aroma of burning coal and hot oil generated by the engine, your nose will begin to twitch. You can even get a cinder in your eye, a park ranger warns, when riding The Scranton Limited.
It just doesn’t get any more real than this!
Steamtown, which became a national historic site in 1986, doesn’t simply preserve history by locking old locomotives and rail cars in stuffy museum rooms or just running a daily train ride.
In the Scranton Railyards of the former Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, visitors will get the whole picture of what the Age of Steam was like, when railroads carried all of the freight and passengers for a growing industrial age.
That means the rail yard’s story goes way beyond simply seeing a steam engine in the distance or climbing onboard a train — which do occur frequently at Steamtown.
There’s ample time to observe more of the detail about keeping trains moving, from being able to see firemen shoveling coal into an engine’s belly or a conductor getting off the train to throw a switch so his train can change tracks.
But there’s much more. Have you ever seen a train drive onto a working roundhouse turntable? Or for that matter, have you ever toured a working roundhouse? You can, at Steamtown.
On a guided tour of the locomotive repair shop and workshops (some sections have been in service for more than 100 years), you’ll see the back story about keeping the engines running, which can be as gritty as the cinders they discharge.
”Steam engines are high maintenance,” says Bill Clark, one of Steamtown’s park rangers as he walks through the locomotive shop. ”They need to be greased and oiled every 250 miles. In other words, on a long run it would be like having to stop at Jiffy Lube several times a day.”
He adds, ”A mechanic here once told me, ‘There are two kinds of parts on an engine. The kind that wear out fast and the kind that wear out slow.’ The people working here have to know what’s wrong with an engine, how to fix it or what part they need to hit with a hammer to get it moving again.”
The scale of the jobs here requires special tools big enough for the tasks involved, like a drill that’s nearly as big as a locomotive’s cab and the bits it uses — so large and heavy that Clark needs two hands to lift them.
He passes Engine No. 26, made by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1929 and says, ”It was running in the 1990s. We have about another year and a half of work before it’s running again.”
Nearby, Boston & Maine Engine No. 3713 is nearly stripped down to its chassis. A little display on the walkway in front of it details the progress of an ongoing campaign by the Lackawanna & Wyoming Valley Railway Historical Society to raise funds to repair it. There’s a collection box for donations, too.
”Old locomotives are like old houses,” Clark says. ”When you start one repair job, you’re bound to find something worse underneath it.”
Visitors also can walk around in the rail yard. But as you step across tracks and among the old rail cars, be mindful of signs warning, ”Danger. Expect trains and locomotives to move in any direction at any time.”
Indoors, the only danger is running out of steam before you’ve seen everything.
There’s the heartwarming film, ”Steel and Steam” that plays continuously in the theater … A Please Touch table of railroad equipment includes a piece of rail, a spike, a conductor’s hat, lantern, an engineer’s bright red bandana and more. A cutaway steam locomotive showing how its sections work. A restored caboose reveals how train crews lived and where the conductor had his office. An amazing restored railway post office car. A box car. A business car with sleeping and working quarters …
But you can’t stop until you’ve been through the history museum detailing the development of railroads in the United States, their role in changing the country from a farming economy to an industrial power and their use in wartime. It also focuses on the legendary Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad which left behind the rail yard and some of the other facilities used by Steamtown today.
Founded to haul coal and iron, it was known for its early mastery of combining steel and concrete for massive structures. They included viaducts (one of which still is the largest of its kind in the world) and beautiful stations like the marble-columned one in Scranton that has been turned into a luxury hotel.
The DL&W also prided itself in clean-running engines. Because the line used cleaner-burning anthracite, rather than the bituminous coal used by other railroads, the Scranton-based company could advertise that their passengers’ clothing was cleaner at the end of a trip.
You’ll even be introduced to Phoebe Snow, the fictitious woman in white who figured in most of the DL&W advertising. Always dressed in white, Phoebe’s image was accompanied by little poems like this one:
”Says Phoebe Snow
about to go
upon a trip to Buffalo
My gown stays white
from morn till night
Upon the Road of Anthracite”
The Technology Museum explores steam railroading further, from explaining how steam engines work (”like a big teapot!”) to different forms of railroading communications including signal lanterns and bells, as well as whistles and the telegraph.
Before leaving, you can guess the meanings of hobos’ shorthand — chalk pictures they left behind on sidewalks and fences for fellow hobos who came after them — that warned of a ”man with a gun,” or directed their fellow hobos to a ”sweet lady.” You’ll also see pet names trainmen had for one another, like ”Brains,” ”Captain,” ”Skipper,” ”Swell Head” and ”Smart Alec” — which all referred to the train’s conductor.
Taking a short ride on the Scranton Limited, which boards visitors in the rail yard and operates four 30-minute rides daily, is a good way to wrap up a visit. When you pay the extra $3 at the admission booth for the experience, you can ride it once or go out on every run.
As the sturdy steam engine No. 2317 is fired up and begins moving the passenger cars, a park ranger points out the fine features of one of the cars (the only one) that has been completely restored, inside and out.
The train chugs past much of Steamtown’s other rolling stock, sitting still and silent on various tracks while awaiting heavy repair and restoration. Showing varying degrees of rust and decay, some even have boarded-up windows and have been stripped of their seats.
Peering at them through your window, it’s impossible not to think of their glory days in the early 1900s … and of Thomas the Tank Engine and his brightly painted pals. Here’s hoping these old cars and engines will have happy endings, too.