Oil Creeki & Titusville Railroad

The Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad runs over tracks laid in the 1880s as the main line of the Buffalo, New York and Philadelphia Railroad, with the trackage in Titusville originally owned by the Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley and Pittsburgh Railroad. That company was reorganized in 1887 into the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad, which the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired in 1900; the Pennsylvania's 1968 merger with the New York Central created Penn Central, whose 1976 bankruptcy swept the route into Conrail. The line was out of service when the Oil Creek Railway Historical Society purchased it from Conrail in 1986 — the first tourist trains ran on July 18 of that year, and freight operations followed on September 25. From December 1995 to August 1996 the operation briefly extended over a former Conrail main line between Meadville and Corry before that trackage reverted. Today the tourist trains share the rails with a working freight business, hauling over 1,000 carloads and more than 20,000 passengers a year on a route the railroad promotes as running "through the valley that changed the world," a nod to the region's oil history.