2 July 1999

Steaming Through a World
That Time Left Behind

Strasburg Railroad locomotive number 90 at Groff's Grove - Date/photographer unknown.

Lancaster County Pennsylvania USA - This was old-time Pennsylvania railroad country, but there was nothing of the Rust Belt about it. There was no soot in the air, no grime to speak of, no debris scattered in weeds along the track beds. The landscape was actually scenic, and for a camera-toting tourist at the heart of it, in the historic town of Strasburg, there were plenty of pretty shots to be had:  a Georgian brick home serenely overlooking a shady Main Street, a white barn and silo standing crisply by a green pasture, a Victorian station restored to its gabled glory. All with photo-album potential.
 
But if there's one image from Strasburg that I'll surely keep, one that managed in a single frame to sum up the place as well as my main reason for being there, it's a picture my camera didn't get.
 
The setting was a coach of an antique train, its iron-horse locomotive billowing steam across a swath of southeastern Pennsylvania farmland on a nine-mile round-trip jaunt between Strasburg and a forlorn-looking junction called, without a trace of irony, Paradise. The coach, as tall as a lamppost, was rocking and groaning as the train lumbered across fields newly sprouting with corn and rye, signs of late spring in Lancaster County.
 
A conductor in blue with a handlebar mustache brushed by as he pushed his way up the aisle, and my eyes got pulled along in his wake, drifting from the bobbing heads of passengers to the varnished oak paneling all around to the brass chandeliers swaying overhead.
 
I think it was the shriek of the locomotive's whistle that summoned me back to the window, or maybe it was just a parent's sixth sense, but I turned to see that my 3-year-old son had poked his head out from under the raised wooden sash and was drinking in sights this New York boy had never seen. I didn't want to lose him, so I grabbed him by the elastic waist of his blue jeans, tugged him inside a bit and didn't let go. Outside, a turkey farm rolled by, then a gang of dull-eyed cows lazing by the tracks, then the Cherry Hill depot, which isn't much of a depot at all but rather a whitewashed wood-frame booth planted by the side of a grade crossing.
 
It was right about there that the elements of my indelible picture began to arrange themselves. Fifty yards off or so, in a field furrowed as evenly as corduroy, a plow pulled by a team of six horses came into view. Riding on a cross-piece and gripping the reins was a boy of no more than 12. He was wearing a floppy white straw hat, a homespun powder-blue shirt, and a pair of black suspenders holding up his, well, britches. He might have even been barefoot. As the train chugged by, it let out a whoop, and the boy turned and waved.
 
Freeze frame. Two distinct, even clashing, American traditions had fortuitously and visibly converged:  the steam railroad, harbinger of a mechanized age, and the peaceful Plain People, shunners of technological progress, both evoking in their different ways the romance and simplicity of life in the 19th century, or at least our sepia-tinted view of it from the lip of the 21st.
 
For an instant, the view was a distillation of Strasburg (population 2,600), where the country lanes of the Amish and the railroad tracks of yesteryear intersect. And completing the tableau, at the center of the frame, was a 3-year-old, who had brought us to this point.
 
Like many a child bolting from toddlerhood, my son has a passion for trains, mostly of the toy variety. (In his case it may be genetic:  a great-grandfather was a railroad man, on the New Haven line.) And like many parents of children who are both uncontainable and urban, an often incompatible mix, my wife and I needed to get out of the city for a few days and into some un-walled space. The Strasburg area promised to satisfy all parties. It's pastoral, but it's also command central for railroad buffs, being home to one of the oldest operating steam rail lines in America, a magnificent railroad museum next door, and enough toy trains to occupy even the most fidgety enthusiast, of any age.
 
A Train Lover's Playground
 
Our first stop on entering Strasburg was the railroad station, even though we'd come by car after a three-and-a-half-hour drive from New York. Built in 1882 and now fully restored, the station, it's actually the East Strasburg Station, is the centerpiece of a tourist site that's one part living history, one part museum, and one part small-scale theme park. The grounds contain a railroad memorabilia gift shop, a toy train store (a must-see for us), a sweets emporium, a restaurant called the Dining Car, and a portrait studio in which you can pose stiffly in 19th-century dress advertised as authentic.
 
You can also tour a restored luxury suite on rails built for the big shots of the Philadelphia & Reading line in 1916. The coach, with cut-glass ceiling lamps and mahogany paneling inlaid with rosewood, cost a hefty $100,000 to build, the equivalent of $1 million today, and houses separate sitting and dining rooms, three bedrooms, and a full kitchen with bunks for the stewards and chef.
 
But the real attraction is the Strasburg Railroad itself, the nation's oldest shortline railroad, it was founded in 1832 and became a tourist operation in 1958. Today the line has four fearsomely voracious steam engines, consuming 1,000 gallons of water and a half-ton of hand-shoveled coal per mile, and 14 restored wooden coaches, each with its own 19th-century decor and degree of comfort.
 
The basic coaches are hardly austere, they come with plush upholstered seats, brass-trimmed interiors of polished wood and stained glass, and a working wood stove in one corner. The first-class parlor car, which you can ride for a few dollars more than the usual $8.25 adult fare, is furnished with Gilded Age sofas, tables inlaid with checkerboards, and a bar. One might be tempted to light up a cigar and order a scotch if only the rules permitted it, and if only the bar served alcoholic drinks. Riders can also choose a yellow open-air observation car that was used in the movie "Hello Dolly" or a dining car, which serves both lunch and dinner by reservation.
 
In the spirit of our journalistic mission, we took two trips, of 45 minutes each, riding in a standard coach the first time and the dining car the other. I can report that the basic coach alone would have been fine, though my son was amused to be served a hot dog on a train, his parents found the food unappetizing and unbefitting the stately coach in which it was served.
 
But, then again, you don't come for the food, the feel of history is the thing. And the train provides that in abundance, transporting you back as it trundles through countryside that does its part in stoking the illusion of times gone by.
 
This, after all, is home to the Amish, from the train you can see the bearded men in wide-brimmed hats driving horse-drawn buggies and hay wagons, the children riding wooden scooters, the bonneted women hanging hand-washed clothes on the lines. The train remains at a respectful remove, but you can hardly observe the Amish from a century-old coach and not imagine you're looking into the past.
 
The imperatives of the present moment can also be strong, and after a few hours of railroading we were ready for our room at the Historic Strasburg Inn, just outside the center of town. The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, directly across the road from the station, would have to wait.
 
History and Local Shoppes
 
We learned this on a quick walking tour of the Strasburg historic district after unpacking and collecting ourselves. The old town, originally settled about 1733 by Swiss Mennonites, who named it after the cathedral city in Alsace, is clustered around two intersecting streets, Main and Decatur. Main Street has known traffic since at least 1714, when it was part of the Old Conestoga Road, the first westward trail from Philadelphia. Today, dozens of brick, stone, and wood-frame homes dating from the late 18th century and well into the 19th line these streets. Among them are several 250-year-old log houses that put you in mind of settlers in buckskin shouldering muskets.
 
The district also has a few stores and businesses, and happily, by all appearances they're quite local, there's not a Benneton or a Starbucks in sight. There is, for example, Sadie's Rose, which advertises homemade crafts "and canned foods." At Mrs. Penn's Shoppe (gifts and watch repair), a portly Amish man sat on a bench by the door, alternately reading his Bible and dozing. And outside the Yule Shoppe a posted sign pleaded, "Amish Friends Please Clean Up After Your Horses!"
 
Which is not to say that Strasburg is just a hitching post, untouched by the wide world. A couple of miles away is Route 30, a deadening strip of outlet malls and fast-food filling stations worthy of Anywhere, U.S.A.
 
On the other hand, there was nothing pretentious about the Strasburg Country Store and Creamery, which dispenses the best ice cream around. And though two of the finer inns in the district, the Strasburg Village Inn and the Limestone Inn, were graciously fitted out, there was nothing stuffy about them. Indeed, the Limestone's proprietor, Denise Waller, exhibited the manner of a solicitous house mother toward her mostly young guests as she took me on a tour of her 213-year-old establishment.
 
I'd like to say that we wished we had had more time to nose around the historic district, but in truth there wasn't a lot more to see, you can get the flavor of it in an hour. Besides, there was Amish country to explore, and we had a young train aficionado to tend to. So the next day, as planned, we headed back to the railroad museum, about a mile up the road. We were glad we did.
 
The museum is a cool, cavernous, 100,000-square-foot barn housing almost 100 pieces of rolling stock along parallel concrete platforms reminiscent of the grand terminals of Europe. One needn't be a railroad buff (I'm not, or at least wasn't) to be impressed and fascinated by this collection. The stock, all either made or used in Pennsylvania, ranges from an 1855 Cumberland Valley baggage and passage car ("one of the oldest pieces of railroad equipment in existence," the sign said) to a modern behemoth, a snub-nosed 1963 diesel freight locomotive. In between are 100 years and untold tons of coaches, cabooses, mail cars, Pullman cars, restaurant cars, private executive coaches, and a big complement of locomotives.
 
Trains to Go
 
The museum more than satisfied my and my wife's curiosity about trains, in short, we'd had enough. But my son had other ideas after spotting a store called the Choo Choo Barn (which features an animated 1,700-square-foot working display) and next to it a franchise outlet for the Thomas the Tank Engine line of toy trains. So we pulled in off the road, only to emerge an hour later a little wearied but with a new addition to our Thomas set in hand.
 
That, too, might have sufficiently capped our railroad weekend, but as we were leaving Strasburg we decided to go the distance and see the last remaining train attractions in town:  the National Toy Train Museum and, next door to it, the oddest motel we'd ever encountered. The museum houses an extensive collection of toy trains and five lavish working layouts that even a 3-year-old can operate. But the Red Caboose Motel and Restaurant is of a more surprising order. It must be the only extant motel consisting entirely of cabooses, more than 30 of them, each refurbished and strung end to end in three rows on a lot beside the Strasburg tracks.
 
The founder, Don Denlinger, a garrulous Mennonite and a native of Lancaster County, can explain how, as a younger man, he came to own the cabooses, which were destined for scrap, after making a $100 bid for them on a lark in 1970. Now the business, as eccentric as it is altogether right for this patch of railroad country, is thriving, helped in small part by a buggy ride service on the premises.
 
It was from the driver's seat of a buggy, in fact, that Mr. Denlinger told us about his motel before turning down a road into Amish country. Then he began un-spooling stories about the families in those parts:  about the 90-year-old patriarch Gideon Lapp and his seven sons, about an 11-year-old boy who was killed in a horrible farm accident, and whose mother, Mr. Denlinger said, "fainted dead away on the spot." At one point we passed a youth walking by the side of the road. "Enoch, get a horse!" Mr. Denlinger shouted, laughing. New York was still a few hours and another state of mind away. For the time being we were content just to roll on to the clip-clop of hooves. Every so often, from a distance, from another time, we'd hear a train whistle blow.
 
From Here to a Place Called Paradise
 
Here is information on Strasburg, Pa. (Daily hotel room rates based on double-occupancy.)
 
Where to Stay
 
RED CABOOSE MOTEL, 312 Paradise Lane, Route 741, Paradise Lane, Strasburg, (717) 687-5000. Rate:  $69 to $105.
 
Where to Eat
 
IRON HORSE INN, 135 East Main Street, Strasburg, (717) 687-6362. Open daily except Mondays.
 
Attractions
 
STRASBURG RAIL ROAD, P.O. Box 96, Route 741, Strasburg, (717) 687-7522 (srrtrain@strasburgrailroad.com). Fares:  adults $8.25, children 3 to 11 $4, under 3 free. Open daily through Labor Day, 11 train rides a day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
 
RAILROAD MUSEUM OF PENNSYLVANIA, P.O. Box 125, Strasburg, (717) 687-8628, (www.rrhistorical.com/frm). Open Mondays through Saturdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sundays 12 to 5 p.m. Admission:  adults $6, the elderly $5, children 6 to 12 $4, under 5 free.
 
NATIONAL TOY TRAIN MUSEUM, 300 Paradise Lane, off Route 741, Strasburg, (717) 687-8976, (www.traincollectors.org/toytrain.html). Open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., through 31 Oct. Admission:  $3 the elderly, $2.75 children 5 to 12 $1.50, under 5 free.
 
How to Get There
 
BY CAR:  From New York, take Interstate 95 to the New Jersey Turnpike, south to Exit 6, then west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Exit 21, Route 222. South to Lancaster, exiting at U.S. Route 30. Follow Route 30 seven miles east to County Route 896, then south to Route 741 (Main Street in Strasburg).
 
BY TRAIN:  Amtrak provides daily service from Penn Station in Manhattan to Lancaster, Pa., eight miles north of Strasburg, roundtrip fare, $84. A taxi ride from the train station to Strasburg costs $12 to $20 each way, taxi information, (717) 392-2222. Amtrak information:  (800) 872-7245.
 
BY BUS:  Martz Trailways provides bus service from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan to Strasburg. Roundtrip fare:  $37.25; half-price for children.
 
William McDonald.

Back