Steamtown and the Age of Steam
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
Downtown Scranton sits on the former yard of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and today that yard is Steamtown National Historic Site, a fifty-two-acre campus that is the only National Park unit in the United States dedicated entirely to the history of steam railroading.
The railroad this yard once served was born out of the same coal economy that built Scranton itself. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western was formed in eighteen fifty-three from a merger of two predecessor lines, and its core mission was simple: move anthracite coal from the Lackawanna Valley to markets in New York and beyond. It was so closely associated with coal that a long-running advertising campaign in the early twentieth century featured a fictional character named Phoebe Snow, a woman in white who rode the Lackawanna because its anthracite-powered engines produced no sooty smoke.
The collection of historic locomotives at Steamtown came from an unusual source: F. Nelson Blount, heir to a New England seafood fortune, who spent decades collecting vintage steam engines and amassed one of the largest private locomotive collections in the country. After Blount's death in nineteen sixty-seven, the collection passed through other hands before moving to Scranton in nineteen eighty-four, and Congress later authorized the National Park Service to acquire and operate the site. By nineteen ninety-five, the federal government had invested sixty-six million dollars in the facility.
Today you can see the Union Pacific Big Boy Number Four Thousand Twelve, a locomotive so large it weighs one point two million pounds and produced six thousand two hundred horsepower. You can watch the roundhouse turntable rotate a working locomotive into the repair shop. You can ride a heritage excursion through the old DLW yards and listen to the hiss of steam.
The trains that rolled through here carried the coal, the iron, the immigrants, and the finished goods that made northeastern Pennsylvania the industrial engine of the Gilded Age. Steamtown is where that era can still be heard as well as seen.
