History

While the P&L Branch never existed in reality, it needed to have a plausible backstory for me to develop a realistic track plan and surrounding scenery. Thus, I developed this brief synopsis based on the histories of other railroads in the nearby area. Note that the entirety of the following write-up is fictional!

The Paxtonia & Linglestown Railroad was incorporated in 1848 to connect these two small villages with the under-construction Pennsylvania Railroad mainline just north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The nine-mile line opened in 1850, leaving the PRR mainline near the present-day Harrisburg intermodal terminal and heading east along present-day I-81 to Linglestown, then curving south towards Paxtonia. With its proximity to the state capital, the branch quickly obtained several large customers between its two namesake communities, including a brewery and a paper mill.

In 1857, the line was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad, who simultaneously acquired a series of railroads east of Harrisburg to complete a Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh main line. Additional industries sprung up along the PRR’s new Paxtonia & Linglestown Branch in downtown Linglestown, including a bakery and the local newspaper, as well as a rail-served general store and farm supply store that supplied much of the agriculture in the immediate area. Despite the cessation of local Harrisburg-to-Paxtonia passenger service during the Great Depression, the PRR would continue to foster freight business in the area over the next several decades. A large cement plant was opened on the outskirts of Linglestown during World War II, and the paper mill between Paxtonia and Linglestown was expanded just after the war. With the explosion of personal automobiles post-World War II, a small scrapyard was opened near the brewery.

By the late 1960s, only a local lumber dealer remained in Paxtonia, receiving less than five carloads a year. Shortly after the Penn Central merger in 1968, the PC applied for abandonment of the last mile of track to Paxtonia, stating that the five cars of lumber per year did not justify the maintenance costs of the line. The ICC granted the abandonment in 1969, and the line was torn up east of the paper mill in 1970, reducing the total length to eight miles. The branch was officially renamed the P&L Branch at this time (which was what all of the crews called it anyway).

The late 1960s and early 1970s warehousing boom more than made up for the lost lumber traffic. A new general warehouse was opened on the site of an old chemical facility near the cement plant, and a food warehouse was constructed on a re-zoned piece of farmland at the new end of the line north of Paxtonia. The former PRR passenger station in Linglestown, abandoned for almost four decades, was razed in 1972, and the freight house across the tracks was sold to a local beer distributor. The local coal dealer, who had previously received occasional carloads of coal at the freight house, set up a small coal transload facility on the former site of the passenger station, and the tracks through downtown were abandoned beyond this point. Despite feeling the effects of the national downturn in rail freight traffic, the carloadings on the branch actually increased during Penn Central’s ownership due to the new business, spurred by the line’s proximity to the state capital. The fact that many customers were locally oriented and served each other’s businesses with enough volume to justify occasional on-line moves between customers helped to keep the line’s carloadings strong. Paper, grain, and beer were all handled between industries on the same branch, forcing local crews to constantly sort and shuffle the cars in their trains to make complicated inter-plant moves.

Conrail operations commenced in 1976 and continued into the late 1970s without much deviation from those of its predecessor. Road trains would set out cars for the branch at a small five-track yard just north of Harrisburg, which also had a small engine track to house the local power. The crew for Conrail local WHLI-20 (W = Wayfreight, H = Harrisburg Division, LI = Linglestown, 20 = Job Number) would sign up at the yard at 4:00 PM every weekday and trundle up the branch, usually leaving the yard with a single engine, five cars, and a caboose. On busier days, a second train with an extra crew (WHLI-20X) would sign up at 5:00 PM and follow the first section, and a dedicated yard crew could also be called to sort cars for the two jobs. By October 7, 1979, the line had become a haven for some of the remaining ALCo power in the region, due to its proximity to the Enola diesel facility that kept them running. The Enola mechanical forces didn’t like the ALCos straying too far from the shop, and the P&L Branch was a good assignment for an engine that was “working out the kinks” after a prolonged stay in Enola. With the consistent late afternoon crew schedule, semi-regular ALCo power, and the volume of unpredictable traffic, the line remained a visually and operationally interesting segment of Conrail’s territory.