Salamanca Rail Museum

Salamanca, a Cattaraugus County city set inside the Allegany Indian Reservation of the Seneca Nation, was once a thriving railroad hub where both the Erie Railroad and the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway kept facilities. Generations of residents worked for the railroads, and much of the city's housing was originally built for railroad families by the companies themselves. The Salamanca Rail Museum opened in 1984 in the former BR&P depot — a restored 1912 passenger station — initially to house the city's railroad archives. The depot outlasted the trains it served: the Baltimore and Ohio, the BR&P's successor, ran its final passenger trains in the mid-1950s, while the Erie Railroad and, from 1960, the Erie Lackawanna carried passengers through Salamanca for a while longer. Today the station building houses the museum's railroad artifacts and historical displays, recalling the era when the city's fortunes ran on rails.