Tyrone: The Busiest Stop Between Two Cities

Tyrone is a railroad town through and through. The Pennsylvania Railroad's main line reached this valley in eighteen fifty, and the first station went up in eighteen fifty-one. Lyon, Shorb and Company purchased the site and laid out the town that same year, and Blair County formally incorporated Tyrone as a borough in eighteen fifty-seven.

What the railroad made, the railroad shaped: Tyrone sat at the junction where short-line railroads from the coal and timber regions of the north fed traffic onto the main line. By the end of the eighteen hundreds, Tyrone was the busiest passenger stop between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania Railroad established repair shops here in eighteen sixty-eight and built an ornate station to match the town's importance.

By eighteen seventy the population had reached eighteen hundred, driven by coal traffic, lumber, and the workers who kept the trains running. The old railroad importance has faded, but Tyrone's tight grid of Victorian commercial buildings still reflects the confidence of a town that once believed it sat at the center of the world.