Mills Building, (Broad St.,) 8th Floor, Room 26.
New York, New York

web page created 03.07.04

1881                                                                                                                                            1885

Welcome
to the 
William Henry Vanderbilt's
South Pennsylvania Railroad
right of way
 into
Pennsylvania Railroad Country

The purpose of this web page and the contents within are to inform the reader that the South Pennsylvania Railroad right of way is a challenging research project. It has been almost ten years since I started looking for the abandoned alignment. The fact that it was not a completed route offered many challenges. Some of the route is located on the Pennsylvania Turnpike while most of it is found on private property. But the real challenge is the areas where no work was done what so ever.  Here on the South Pennsylvania Railroad, I have discovered exactly where the route was to be built. Imagine exploring over 209.0 miles of this route. I say over, as I have also explored the branch lines as well. Below are some of the not to well known sites that I have found very interesting and worth telling about.

It took many years, months nd months of map reading and exploring sites that are found on the maps as well as finding many work sites which includes stone quarries, field offices, fills, cuts, culverts, both completed and partially started culverts. But my most time consuming research is the meeting of the property owners who live along this route. Much of the sites on private property had to be accessed and to do this, much explaining to each individual property owner had to be done. I now know what it was like for the railroad agent who also had to get access to the property so that the railroad could confirm who owned what property that the route was to travel through. It really was an experience discovering the route. One I always think about in my spare time.

Harrisburg & Western Railroad

Some of the maps found in the South Penn document boxes, reveal that the South Penn had tried to keep the survey of the railrod under cover and named it the Harrisburg & Western Railroad. I have found several maps that was showing the same survey routes as the South Penn with the title of the Harisburg & Western Raiload.

Sewickley Tunnel Site

One of the newly discovered sites which seems to have remained elusive to everyone is the Sewickley Tunnel site.

Tunnel #10.

Below left: The whereabouts of the elusive Sewickley Tunnel is now closer then you think. While on a Pennsylvania Archives trip to Harrisburg last October, I stumbled across a copyright 1882, Rand McNally map where a curious railroad doodler decided to mark the path that the South Penn would travel along. Here is a small section of this map revealing clearly the marked out Sewickley Tunnel site was to be built at. Here it is seen emptying out of the Sewickley Creek Valley into the Youghiogheny River Valley just north of the community of West Newton. A few broken red dots beyond the proposed tunnel site reveals that it would cross the river to connect with the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad line to Pittsburgh.

Below right: A 1916 topographic map of the area. I placed red arrows on this map to show where this site most likely was to be built and the grade leading to the connecting railroad on the west shore of the river leading to Pittsburgh.