Strasburg Rail Road, America's Oldest
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
The Strasburg Rail Road was chartered in eighteen thirty-two for a reason that still feels familiar: a larger project had bypassed the town. When the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad chose a route that skipped Strasburg, local merchants organized their own short line to connect to it. Strasburg is the oldest continuously operating standard-gauge railroad in the western hemisphere.
For over a century it hauled freight and passengers on a modest four-mile route through Lancaster County farmland. By the nineteen fifties, it was close to abandonment. A group of railroad enthusiasts bought it in nineteen fifty-eight and transformed it into a tourist operation built around steam, restoring historic locomotives and passenger cars that were disappearing from railroads everywhere else.
Today it still runs historic steam locomotives and restored passenger cars. What started as a commercial workaround became an accidental archive of American railroad history.
