The Paoli Local and the Birth of Pennsylvania’s Main Line

For many years, passengers on the Paoli Local rode in Pennsylvania Railroad cars like this one.
Photograph courtesy of Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society Image Collection, tehistory.org

“In the year 1857, when the Columbia Railroad passed into the possession of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company . . . the local travel was very light, very few of the business men of the city having residences out of town,” wrote William Hasell Wilson (1811–1902) in his memoir of life as a railroad engineer. During the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries, Wilson, his family and the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR, also known as the “Pennsy”) would transform the farmland west of Philadelphia into the suburb called the Main Line and the train that took one there, the Paoli Local, into the most famous commuter rail line in America.

Wilson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1811, the son and grandson of military engineers. In 1896 he published a book titled Reminiscences of a Railroad Engineer, which provided insight into the evolution of railroading in the 19th century through Wilson’s accounts of his work for the Pennsy and other American railroads. His father, John Wilson (1789–1833), came to Charleston to take charge of the city’s fortifications during the War of 1812. In 1827 John was appointed to make surveys in Pennsylvania for either a canal or a railroad between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna River. At age 16 William Hasell Wilson joined his father’s crew, where one of his coworkers was J. Edgar Thomson (1808–74), who would become a PRR president. John Wilson died in 1833, but William stayed on the job, and in 1840 he published in the prestigious Journal of the Franklin Institute an account of the construction of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad (P&C), the first rail line west of Philadelphia, which ran through a village called Paoli.

The P&C was part of Pennsylvania’s Main Line of Public Works, a system of railways and canals linking Philadelphia and the emerging city of Pittsburgh. When John Wilson was hired, it was still unclear whether railroads or canals would be a better form of long-distance transportation, so the Pennsylvania legislature ordered the Main Line commissioners to consider both options and make this crucial decision. In his 1840 article, William Hasell Wilson wrote, “There were but few railways of any extent in use, and those of very imperfect construction. It was also prior to the successful use of the locomotive engines. . . . Very few were sanguine enough to anticipate their general adoption.” Still, basing his advice on local topography and water supply, John Wilson recommended that Pennsylvania build a railroad. Construction work began in 1829.

In his work for the Pennsylvania Railroad, William Hasell Wilson, pictured here in his later years, did much to develop Philadelphia’s western suburbs, now known as the Main Line.
From William Bender Wilson, History of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Coates & Co., 1895)

In his memoir, William Hasell Wilson wrote, “In the early part of the year 1830, I accompanied my father to Baltimore, and had my first experience in track-laying, by witnessing the operations on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in the vicinity of Ellicott’s Mills.” During construction of the P&C, its engineers and laborers learned much from experience. For example, the original method of railroad construction, where the rails were secured on parallel lines of stone blocks called “sleepers” sunk into a bed of gravel, created too unstable a structure. A better method proved to be laying the rails across wooden ties.

In his 1840 article, Wilson wrote, “In April 1834, a single track was completed throughout, and in October of the same year, both tracks for the entire length of the road were open for public use.” John Wilson had chosen a route that more or less followed the existing Philadelphia & Lancaster Turnpike. The completed railroad was just under 82 miles long, crossing 22 bridges and viaducts. It ran from Broad and Vine streets in Philadelphia across the Schuylkill River, then west along a natural ridge. It descended into the Great Chester Valley, crossing Valley Creek and the east and west branches of the Brandywine, then ascended onto what was known as Mine Ridge at Gap. It crossed Pequea Creek and the Big and Little Conestoga creeks, finally reaching Columbia where it terminated at the basin of the Pennsylvania Canal.

The Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad connected with two privately operated branch railroads. One ran from West Chester to a point on the railroad that was then called Intersection, now Malvern. The other connected Harrisburg to the P&C at Lancaster.

The original idea had been for horses to pull the freight and passenger cars, but in 1834 the commonwealth authorized the purchase and use of locomotives. By the time his article was published in 1840, Wilson reported, “The number of locomotive engines on the road . . . was thirty-six, of which twenty-seven were in good order.” The passenger and freight cars, however, were privately owned, their owners paying a toll to use the road and attach their cars to a state-owned locomotive. In concept, the P&C was a turnpike, but one built for a different kind of vehicle.

The P&C had problems at both its ends, specifically its inclined planes, an early engineering feature designed to enable trains to negotiate steep hills. A stationary steam engine in a hilltop engine house hauled the freight and passenger cars up and down. Horses pulled the cars to the inclined planes and the P&C’s locomotives pulled the cars between them, a system that did not make for efficient transportation. In 1840 Wilson wrote, “The inclined planes on this road being a source of expense and delay . . . every possible effort has been made to avoid them. A new route of six miles in length has been located, and is now nearly completed, by which the plane at Columbia will be dispensed with.” The Main Line commissioners later took over construction of the West Philadelphia Railroad, which had been incorporated in 1835 but was never completed. This gave the P&C tracks between present-day Ardmore and the Schuylkill, bypassing the inclined plane at Belmont, which was abandoned in 1850. The Schuylkill bridge at Market Street was widened and strengthened, and by 1852 locomotives could pull P&C trains to a terminus at 18th and Market.

Inclined planes, such as this one in Belmont, were invented to take rail cars up and down steep hills. They became obsolete by the mid-19th century.
World Digital Library

Significantly missing from Wilson’s 1840 article was any mention of railroad stations. A P&C train schedule published in 1837 showed that daily through trains made six stops between Philadelphia and Columbia, while a second daily train, called “A Train for the Accommodation of Way Passengers,” made 18 stops between the railroad’s terminal points. Outside Philadelphia, on the current route of the Paoli Local, P&C trains stopped at Whitehall (near present-day Bryn Mawr), Brookeville (now Radnor), Eagle (now Strafford) and Paoli. In all cases there was an existing tavern, hotel or other public establishment where passengers could gather to wait for the train.

Located about 20 miles west of Philadelphia, the Paoli area had long been a popular stop for folks heading west. A Native American trail had become a colonial bridle path. In 1769 Joshua Evans opened an inn, which he named after the Corsican general and war hero Pasquale Paoli. The General Paoli Inn gradually lent its name to the surrounding settlement. In 1791 the Pennsylvania legislature ordered construction of a turnpike between Philadelphia and Lancaster, making the General Paoli Inn a popular stagecoach stop. Tradition has it that Joshua Evans Jr. feasted John Wilson, his survey crew, and the Main Line commissioners at his family’s inn to convince them that the P&C railroad should be routed through Paoli.

The P&C was profitable but the larger transportation system, the Main Line of Public Works, was not. Its canals froze in winter and flooded in spring, while its Allegheny Portage Railroad, a series of inclined planes that got cars over the western mountain ridges, was slow and dangerous. By the mid-1850s the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was ready to sell the entire thing — the problem was finding a buyer.

Pennsylvania’s businessmen had long been clamoring for better transportation between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and in 1846 the governor signed legislation creating a private entity called the Pennsylvania Railroad to build a line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh to eliminate the canal-rail-canal bottlenecks west of the Susquehanna.

By 1852 that railroad had trains running from Harrisburg to the Allegheny Portage Railroad, whose inclined planes PRR made obsolete in 1854 with its famous Horseshoe Curve. The Pennsy’s business model for growth would become one of acquiring other railroads. In 1848 they acquired the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mount Joy & Lancaster Railroad, the branch linking Harrisburg to the P&C.

The owners of the historic Paoli Inn may have lobbied to get the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad routed through Paoli.
From Julius F. Sachse, The Wayside Inns on the Lancaster Roadside Between Philadelphia and Lancaster, 2nd ed. (New Era, 1912)

J. Edgar Thomson, by then president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, wanted to acquire the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad as well. To bring down its price, he hired William Hasell Wilson to begin making surveys for a modern and efficient rail line that would run parallel to the P&C and compete directly with it. Seeing that this would greatly reduce the value of the commonwealth’s asset, the legislature passed a bill in 1857 to sell the entire Main Line of Public Works to the Pennsylvania Railroad for $7.5 million.

On August 1, 1857, the Pennsy took formal possession and appointed Wilson resident engineer of the former P&C. In his memoirs, he wrote, “In consequence of the uncertainty as to the disposition of the State Railroad prevailing for the two years preceding the sale, their condition had been allowed to depreciate, and for some time after the transfer the maintenance of way required extraordinary attention.”

Once the Civil War started, PRR’s priority was to protect their railroad, which had become an important east–west thoroughfare for the Union. A wartime shortage of laborers and material made extensive improvements difficult.

Once the conflict was over, Wilson wrote, “My attention was given exclusively to constructions, which included laying of second and third tracks, changing bridge structures, building workshops, passenger and freight stations, wharves, etc.” Wilson’s priorities also included straightening the route of the P&C, which had been constructed with curves designed to avoid steep grades. The increasingly powerful locomotives, which had completely replaced horses pulling trains, made possible a straighter route and faster trains.

The train station at Bryn Mawr in 1875. The freight and baggage building is still standing.
From Suburban Stations and Rural Homes on the Pennsylvania Railroad (Office of the General Passenger Agent, 1875)

To improve traffic moving through Philadelphia, where several rail lines terminated, Wilson constructed two short lines. In 1860 the Junction Railroad allowed trains to move efficiently north and south through the city. The Connecting Railway, built 1864-67, allowed traffic from the west to move more easily north to New York.

In 1864 the Pennsy constructed a depot at 30th and Market streets, effectively taking the railroad’s traffic off the streets downtown. Passengers used the city’s horsecar street railroad to get to and from the new PRR station. When the nation celebrated its 1876 Centennial, the Pennsy built its Centennial Station, furnished with modern amenities, at 32nd and Market streets to handle the anticipated crowds.

“What is now called the ‘Main Line,’ was not so designated fifty years ago, as the Pennsylvania Railroad had only one line then and comparatively few city families lived on it, even for the summer months,” wrote John W. Townsend (1855–1939) in a book first published in 1919. Townsend was a businessman who became a historian in retirement and an authority on the history of Philadelphia’s Main Line. Philadelphia did have suburbs by the mid-19th century, where the wealthy had established summer estates, but these were mainly north of the city in Chestnut Hill and Germantown.

Wilson and the Pennsy would change that. In 1868 he placed ads in Philadelphia newspapers requesting bids for grading about 2½ miles of new rail line between Athensville (now Ardmore) and present-day Rosemont. To obtain the right of way for this relocation, the railroad purchased 62 acres of farmland in Wilson’s name. By 1869 the railroad had laid out a town on its new property with graded streets shaded by trees.

Wilson noted in his memoirs, “When it became necessary to give a name to the town … I selected Bryn Mawr, which meeting the approval of the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, was adopted.” Wilson added that “Bryn Mawr” meant great hill in Welsh and was the name of the ancestral Welsh home of the Quaker leader Rowland Ellis.

The original Bryn Mawr Hotel, built in 1871–72 by the firm of William Hasell Wilson’s sons.
From Suburban Stations and Rural Homes on the Pennsylvania Railroad (Office of the General Passenger Agent, 1875)

Townsend recorded, “The Railway Company also erected the ‘Bryn Mawr Hotel’ in order to attract settlers to the neighborhood.” During the early 1870s PRR increased the number of its daily accommodation trains leaving Market Street for the new town of Bryn Mawr or continuing farther west to Paoli.

According to Wilson’s memoirs, in 1874 the Pennsylvania Railroad established a “Department of Real Estate” to manage the property they had purchased as well as any more that “might accrue from extensions and other improvements.” Just prior to the Centennial, the Pennsy’s Office of the General Passenger Agent began publishing what can only be described as a real estate development brochure, which went through several editions through the early 20th century, enticing city folks to ride the PRR accommodation trains and visit or settle in the places they served.

The 1875 edition described the ride. After passing through Mantua Junction, the train stopped at Hestonville (present-day 52nd Street), a suburb then being absorbed into the city. Riders could glimpse Fairmount Park, where the Centennial Exposition buildings were being constructed. The train continued west to Overbrook, Merion, Elm (now Narberth) and Wynnewood. Athensville had been renamed Ardmore and by then boasted churches, schools and a public library. The next station was still called Haverford College, despite that the track relocation of 1868 had placed the station a quarter mile from the school. The railroad town of Bryn Mawr then had a permanent population of about 200, which swelled to about 2,000 in the summer when visitors checked in to the railroad’s hotel.

West of Bryn Mawr, one was back in the sticks passing stations at Rosemont, Villanova, Upton and Radnor. The brochure mentioned that Villanova College had a dozen professors and about a hundred students. The Wayne station served an estate named Louella with a mansion and villas, as well as a church, schoolhouse and post office. Private homes were being constructed there on building lots.

The railroad tracks ran parallel to the Lancaster Turnpike through Eagle and Reeseville (now Berwyn). Paoli, at the end of the accommodation train line, had “pleasant groves and shady roads.” The Paoli Inn was conveniently adjacent to the railroad station.

The Ardmore train station, built circa 1875, also by the Wilson Brothers, is no longer standing.
From Suburban Stations and Rural Homes on the Pennsylvania Railroad (Office of the General Passenger Agent, 1875)

In an article for Philly’s Public Ledger reprinted in a book published in 1882, correspondent Joel Cook (1842–1910) wrote, “The railway has erected pretty stone houses for stations . . . some of these buildings being perfect little gems that look as if they were brought bodily over from among the castles of the Rhine or the cottages of Switzerland.” Some of the stations, as well as the original Bryn Mawr Hotel, had been designed and constructed by the architecture and engineering firm called Wilson Brothers & Co. Its three owners were the sons of William Hasell Wilson. They designed the Pennsy stations at Wynnewood (still standing), Haverford (still standing), Ardmore (since demolished) and Bryn Mawr (freight station still standing).

When the 1876 Centennial closed, the Pennsy acquired a small exposition building near its Centennial Station, which it relocated as a passenger station in Wayne. Wayne would become developed as a planned suburban town by George W. Childs, editor of the Public Ledger, and banker Anthony J. Drexel. Its tiny train station was moved to Strafford, and Wayne got a bigger station constructed around 1881–82.

In December 1881 the Pennsylvania Railroad opened its Broad Street Station, allowing its trains to once again operate east of the Schuylkill and its passengers to board commuter trains downtown. Designed by the Wilson brothers, the station’s headhouse faced City Hall with a massive train shed behind it. Trains entered the city on tracks elevated on a viaduct that would later be derided as Philadelphia’s “Chinese Wall.” The Broad Street Station would be expanded by the renowned Frank Furness in 1892–93, and it would serve the city and the Pennsy into the 1950s.

Christopher Morley (1890–1957), novelist, playwright and newspaper columnist, wrote an essay on Broad Street Station and the “medley of types” who passed through it daily. Those boarding the Paoli Local seemed different. Morley wrote, “The Main Line commuters, it is true, seem to stroll trainward like a breed apart, with an air of leisurely conquest and assurance.”

The 1894 edition of the Pennsy’s brochure documented the growth of Philadelphia’s western suburbs, the railroad taking credit for the reasonable fares that had attracted more permanent residents. Pennsy trains passed mansions in Overbrook, Merion and Wynnewood. Ardmore’s population had grown to 3,000, and the town could offer gas, electric lighting, and telephone and telegraph connections. Wayne, with a population of 2,500, had an electric plant and a steam heating plant, as well as churches, a public school and a clubhouse with athletic fields. Paoli had two churches, a school and a town hall, as well as the Paoli Inn, then still in operation. Bryn Mawr continued to be a popular resort, where the railroad hotel had been rebuilt by Frank Furness. Devon had an inn that could accommodate 250 guests. Pennsy passengers could also glimpse the exclusive Merion Cricket Club near the Haverford station.

The train station now serving Strafford originally stood on the grounds of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

By the time the Pennsylvania Railroad had published its 1913 edition, most Main Line towns had the modern amenities of gas, electric lighting, steam heating and paved roads. Bryn Mawr had become a “seat of culture” thanks to Bryn Mawr College and its campus of Elizabethan buildings. Wayne had paved sidewalks, a police and fire department, plus a Saturday Club for women. The Devon Inn was by then hosting an annual horse show on its extensive polo grounds. From the stations at Devon and Berwyn, visitors could get transportation to nearby attractions including Old Saint David’s Church, the King of Prussia Tavern, and the state park at Valley Forge. In another essay, Christopher Morley described riding the Paoli Local as “an excursion into Arcadia.”

As passenger traffic increased, PRR made improvements for more efficient performance. Pennsy engineers had been experimenting with electrically powered trains since around 1900. On September 11, 1915, electrified trains began running between Philadelphia and Paoli.

Electrification of PRR commuter rail lines made it possible to relocate their Philadelphia suburban station and incoming tracks underground following a devastating fire at Broad Street Station in 1923. Construction began in the late 1920s, but full completion was long delayed by the Depression and World War II. It was 1953 before the old Chinese Wall came down. The same year, Paoli got a new train station to replace the one that had been serving passengers since 1883.

Vehicles and pedestrians had long been crossing the tracks at Paoli over a steep bridge, difficult if not impossible for the disabled. Improving accessibility at this and other commuter stations became the focus of the most recent improvements. In 2017 construction began at Paoli on a raised center platform beneath an enclosed pedestrian overpass, reached from either side of the tracks by elevators, stairs and ramps. A relic of the station’s past, an 1883 wooden canopy was repurposed as a bike shelter.

Paoli’s accessibility improvements had been planned as the first phase of a larger project to include relocation of the road over its tracks, plus replacement of the 1953 station with an intermodal transportation center and a large commuter parking garage. But in 2021 the township planning commission admitted that the starting date for these further improvements was uncertain and probably years away.

A new accessible pedestrian overpass now dwarfs the 1953 train station in Paoli.
Photo, Lorett Treese

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Lockdown changed the nature of work and therefore the purpose of commuter rail. During the height of the lockdown, two-thirds of the nation’s professionals were telecommuting from home. Philadelphia’s office buildings were mostly deserted and so were the normally crowded parking lots at regional rail stations.

In 2021 the question became, how many traditional rail commuters would ever return? Some experts foresaw white collar professionals transitioning to a home-and-office hybrid workweek, while many Center City businesses contemplated moving to smaller, less expensive headquarters in the suburbs. The next question became whether commuter rail could adapt or reinvent itself. SEPTA is currently engaged in developing a long-term strategic plan.

The Paoli Local has already survived significant changes, including the demise of the Pennsylvania Railroad and its transfer to Penn Central and later the SEPTA system. The trainyard just west of the Paoli station closed in the 1990s, when it became an EPA superfund site. Malvern became the final stop for most Main Line trains, while some continued west to a new station in Thorndale. For a while, SEPTA tried to rename the Paoli Local the R5. It is now officially named the Paoli/Thorndale Line, but to many riders it remains the Paoli Local.

The western suburban towns, promoted if not built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, are certainly here to stay. And once the regional planning commissions and transit authorities adjust to a postlockdown era, the iconic commuter train that serves the Main Line will live on, most likely with the word “Paoli” forever in its name to acknowledge its history.

The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut

One night in 1832, while the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad was still under construction, a local man walking along the tracks thought he saw the ghosts of the railroad workers who had recently died of cholera dancing around the trench where they had been buried. They would have been the spirits of laborers employed by a contractor named Philip Duffy to dig a cut through a hill about 30 miles west of Philadelphia, which bore the name Duffy’s Cut.

In 2000 Dr. William Watson, a professor at Immaculata University, looked out a window one evening and witnessed three glowing shapes, apparently male, that seemed to be illuminated with neon. Immaculata is several miles away from Duffy’s Cut, but Watson may have been someone whom these ghosts were seeking.

William Watson and his brother, Rev. Dr. Frank Watson, were grandsons of Joseph Tripician, who had worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad for 45 years, becoming assistant to PRR president Martin Clement. While he was coming up in the ranks, Clement had served as stationmaster at Paoli. For years he had collected letters and documents relating to the deaths of the Duffy’s Cut laborers. Tripician took charge of Clement’s file on the subject in 1970, and in 2002 the Watson brothers began reviewing that file.

The Duffy’s Cut laborers had been part of a gang of young Irishmen who came to Philadelphia from Ulster. They had been housed in a workers’ camp where they unfortunately succumbed to a cholera outbreak that ravaged the area in 1832. They were buried at the construction worksite.

The Watsons and a team of fellow academics searched the woods along the railroad tracks and finally located their unmarked grave by using ground-penetrating radar and the account of the 1832 ghost sighting in the Clement file. The state of the human remains they excavated suggested that the laborers might have been murdered either to prevent the spread of disease, or possibly as a mercy killing, but subsequent studies suggest that the apparent injuries might have been caused by natural decomposition.

Today a Pennsylvania Historical Marker stands at the intersection of King and Sugartown roads in Malvern commemorating the deaths of these laborers and their nearby gravesite.

The Phantom Upton Station

There once was a Paoli Local station called Upton located between Villanova and Radnor. The socially prominent Morris family had an estate nearby called Dundale, where Israel Morris constructed mansions for his sons. The society pages often reported on the parties that the Morrises hosted at Dundale, and they seem to have come to regard the Upton station as their private property. Legend has it that one evening the Paoli Local failed to stop to pick up the Morrises’ departing guests. Morris angrily confronted PRR president Alexander Cassatt, who promised that no Pennsy train would ever again fail to make a scheduled stop at Upton. Cassatt had the station torn down before the first Paoli trains ran the following day.

Did this really happen? Cassatt became PRR president in 1899. That autumn, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the railroad planned improvements on the Main Line between Broad Street Station and Paoli. On November 1, the Pennsy’s board meeting minutes recorded its approval to demolish the Upton station. Cassatt was not a vindictive man who would have closed a station for spite, but perhaps knowing that the station was already scheduled for demolition, he might have wryly made such a promise to an irate blueblood.

The largest Dundale mansion, Picotte Hall constructed in 1890, remained in the Morris family until 1978, when it was purchased by Villanova University, which uses it for university offices and a venue for special occasions.

The Paoli “Local”

English speakers have been using the word “local” since the 1500s, but use of the term referring to a commuter train making frequent stops appears to have started in Great Britain in the 1840s. “Local trains” evolved into “locals” in England in the 1860s, and the term was adopted in America around the 1880s.

Through the early years of the 1900s, the Pennsylvania Railroad continued to call its commuter trains “accommodation trains,” at least in their timetables and other printed material. The phrase “Paoli Local,” however, appeared in a newspaper article published December 25, 1910, with the headline, “Accident ties up Main Line Locals.” After that, the Paoli Local continued to make a name for itself.

Newspaper columnist Christopher Morley published a poem called “Elegy in a Railroad Station,” referring to the Pennsy’s Broad Street Station in which he wrote of the Paoli Local:

Nothing was so holy as the Local to Paoli
(15 and 45) when we were youngalive
For Wynnewood, Ardmore,
Haverford, Bryn Mawr
Or anywhere along the PRR
Then, as child, boy, student, family man,
We were too self-occupied to scan
That gigantic arch of joys and pains
When trains were really trains.

What does “15 and 45” mean? Riders of a certain age will recall that for many years the Paoli Local regularly departed Center City at a quarter afterthe hour and quarter of the hour.

Further Reading

Cook, Joel. Summer Rambles Near Philadelphia. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1882. / Goshorn, Bob. “The Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad.” Tredyffrin Easttown History Quarterly 23, no. 2 (April 1985): 63-79. / Kalfus, Ken, ed. Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. / Pennsylvania Railroad Co. Suburban Stations and Rural Homes on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Philadelphia: Office of the General Passenger Agent, 1875. / —. Suburban Homes on the Lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad Within a Radius of Thirty Miles Around Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott, 1894. / —. Thirty Miles Around Philadelphia: On the Pennsylvania Railroad. Philadelphia: Allen Lane & Scott, 1913. / Townsend, J.W. The Old Main Line. Philadelphia: 1919; Reprint, self-published, 1922. / Wilson, William H. “Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad.” Journal of the Franklin Institute 29 (1840): 331-341. / —. Reminiscences of a Railroad Engineer. Philadelphia: Railway World Publishing Co., 1896.

Lorett Treese is a regional historian and retired college archivist living in Chester County. She is the author of several books, including Railroads of Pennsylvania and Railroads of New Jersey. Her most recent book, Railroads of the Eastern Shore, covers railroad operations on the Delmarva Peninsula.