Middletown & Hummelstown Rail Road

The Middletown & Hummelstown name goes back to a Pennsylvania railway company founded in July 1888 that lasted until 1924, but today's M&H is a modern shortline revival: the present company dates from 1975, has hauled freight since 1976, and added tourist passenger excursions in 1986. Trains board at an 1891-era freight station in Middletown for an 11-mile round trip along Swatara Creek and the Union Canal, with a narrator relating the history of the canal and sites along the route. The railroad owns all the track between its two namesake towns, though its reach has been tested: PennDOT limited the M&H to twelve crossings per year over four-lane U.S. Route 322 near Hummelstown, and historic flooding from Tropical Storm Lee in September 2011 washed out the northern approach to the Swatara Creek bridge, leaving trips stopping short of Indian Echo Caverns. The line still proved its worth in January 2014, when an M&H crew with a leased Norfolk Southern locomotive delivered a transformer to a substation on Fiddlers Elbow Road — the first such delivery over the route since 1994.