The Reading Railroad

The Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road was chartered by the Pennsylvania legislature on April 4, 1833. The plan was narrow and specific: build a double-track line along the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia up to Reading, then on to the anthracite country at Pottsville, and haul coal for a growing city. The mainline reached Pottsville in 1842; the Port Richmond tidewater terminal in Philadelphia opened May 17 of the same year, giving the road an export dock on the Delaware. By 1844 the railroad had moved 42,843 tons of coal and passed the parallel Schuylkill Canal. Franklin B. Gowen, a former Schuylkill County district attorney, took the presidency in 1869 and pushed the road into vertical integration. In 1870 the Reading bought the canal it had beaten. In 1871 it organized the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company and started acquiring mines, eventually controlling more than 40% of United States anthracite reserves and roughly 142 square miles of coal land.

By 1871 the railroad was, on paper, the largest company in the world: a $170 million market capitalization that Wikipedia's Reading Company article calls the equivalent of roughly $4.5 billion today. Gowen's other bet was harder. In 1873 he hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency and put an operative inside the Molly Maguires, a secret society of Irish miners. Twenty men were hanged between 1876 and 1878, ten of them on a single day, June 21, 1877, known as Black Thursday, with Gowen himself acting as special prosecutor. Historian Harold Aurand later called the sequence one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history: a private corporation investigating, a private police force arresting, and company attorneys prosecuting. On January 29, 1893, the Reading opened its Center City terminal at 12th and Market in Philadelphia. Francis H. Kimball designed the nine-story headhouse; Wilson Brothers & Company designed the single-span arched train shed, then among the largest in the world and today the only one of its kind still standing in the United States. In 1896 the road was reorganized as the Reading Company, a holding structure over the railway and the coal company. Antitrust action forced the mining subsidiary out in 1923; the following year the Philadelphia & Reading Railway stopped operating trains and the Reading Company took over directly.

The Reading built most of its steam power in its own Reading shops. The T-1 class of 4-8-4 Northerns is the road's signature: thirty locomotives rebuilt between 1945 and 1947 from earlier I-10sa 2-8-0 Consolidations, with Baldwin Locomotive Works supplying parts. The last ten T-1s were completed in 1948 and are widely counted as the last steam locomotives built for any American railroad. Ten years later the road turned that fleet loose on paying fans. The Iron Horse Rambles ran from 1959 to 1964, using T-1s 2100, 2102, and 2124 with 2101 in reserve. The first Ramble left Wayne Junction in Philadelphia on October 25, 1959, behind No. 2124, running to Shamokin with 950 passengers on board. Fifty-one trips followed over five seasons; Gettysburg was the most repeated destination. The last Ramble ran Philadelphia to Tamaqua on October 17, 1964. By then the road's freight was already being eaten by trucks and the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, and the Reading was on the slow slide toward receivership.

The Reading filed for bankruptcy on November 23, 1971, a knock-on effect of the Penn Central collapse the year before, on top of collapsing coal traffic and highway competition. SEPTA absorbed most of the remaining passenger service by 1974. On April 1, 1976, the railroad's operating assets were folded into the newly formed Consolidated Rail Corporation, better known as Conrail. What was left of the Reading Company held on to roughly 650 real-estate parcels, some coal properties, and 52 abandoned rights-of-way. The corporation was later renamed Reading International; through a three-way merger finalized December 31, 2001 it continues to exist on the NASDAQ as RDI, now in the movie-theater and real-estate business, with no track, no locomotives, and no relation to the Reading & Northern that operates today.

Half a century after the Reading stopped running its own trains, the road is still findable on the ground. In Philadelphia, the 1893 train shed is now the Grand Hall of the Pennsylvania Convention Center; stainless-steel rails are set into the terrazzo floor to mark where the tracks ran, and Reading Terminal Market continues underneath. In Reading itself, Franklin Street Station has been a passenger depot, a bus terminal, an art installation, and since July 2019 the Saucony Creek Franklin Station Brewpub. Up in Berks County, the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum opened at 500 South Third Street in Hamburg on April 12, 2008, under the Reading Company Technical & Historical Society, which was incorporated in July 1976. The museum holds more than 70 pieces of rolling stock, including the first production General Motors GP-30 diesel-electric locomotive, No. 5513. Andy Muller Jr.'s Reading & Northern, founded in 1983, runs freight and excursions across more than 400 miles of former Reading and Central Railroad of New Jersey track from its Port Clinton shops. T-1 No. 2102 came back to life on May 28, 2022, hauling a nineteen-car Iron Horse Ramble from Reading to Jim Thorpe. Two other T-1s survive as static displays: No. 2101 at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, and No. 2124 at Steamtown in Scranton. No. 2100 is under restoration in Cleveland, planned to run as Reading 250 for the United States semiquincentennial in 2026.