East Broad Top

When Union Pacific No. 4014 hit the rails in May 2019, the Holy Grail of generations of rail enthusiasts was finally in hand: a 4-8-8-4 Big Boy was back in steam. Little did we know then that nine months later another impossible dream would come true: the rescue of the East Broad Top — not as a hiking trail, not as a static display, not as a short remnant, but as a running railroad, shops and all, with operations potentially spanning nearly the length of the original 33-mile main line. From the early 1960s, when it became apparent that the Kovalchick family, who’d bought the railroad for scrap value and even reopened part of it for tourist trains, intended to keep it largely intact, preservationists sought a way to ensure…

The East Broad Top Railroad & Coal Co., despite its title, is a railroad and not a coal company. Coal is 85% of its traffic, and the Rockhill Coal Co. owns a majority of the stock, but the East Broad Top is all railroad — narrow gauge railroad, heavy duty 3-foot gauge track built and maintained to high standards. The line provides general transportation between the East Broad Top coal field in south-central Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line at Mount Union, about halfway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The East Broad Top is one of a class of railroads that is rapidly vanishing. In the 1870s the narrow gauges received the final impetus that was to increase their number by 148 and enhance their length by 4,000-odd miles. EBT…

After a pause following its 1956 shutdown and purchase by Kovalchick Salvage Co., the East Broad Top came back to life on Aug. 13, 1960, when owner Nick Kovalchick agreed to help the borough of Orbisonia celebrate the bicentennial of the town’s foundin In that four-year span, something significant had taken place on North America’s railroads. The shift from steam locomotives to diesels picked up momentum through the 1950s, and was all but complete by the end of the decade. By 1960, steam engines were nearly extinct. But at the dormant EBT, time had stood still. Responding to the community’s request to display a train, Kovalchick went much further, restoring two of the road’s six Mikados — Nos. 12 and 15 — and a few freight and passenger cars. He…

How do you revive a much-loved narrow gauge short line that has a long history but has been dormant for a decade? Night after night through 2019, Brad Esposito sat in the cab of a Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad yard-job engine and pondered that question between switching moves. Esposito, a B&P engineer and longtime volunteer at the iconic but forlorn East Broad Top Railroad, was working on a scheme to save it. He had been prompted in this campaign by a phone call from another longtime EBT fan, Stephen Lane. For much of that year, Esposito spent his days on the phone courting potential backers, or driving 2 hours to pore over property maps at the narrow gauge railroad’s headquarters in Rockhill Furnace, in south-central Pennsylvania. He wrote a business…

Among heritage railroads, very few maintain a stable of locomotives that is native to the site. East Broad Top is a rare example, with all six of its Baldwin Locomotive Works 2-8-2 Mikado-type engines surviving on the property to which they were delivered more than a century ago. After employing a variety of 2-6-0, 2-8-0, and 4-6-0 road engines in the 19th and early 20th centuries, EBT in 1908 bought a 2-6-2 Prairie-type, No. 11, from Baldwin. It followed up in 1911 with what was basically a stretched version of that engine, 2-8-2 No. 12. From then on, the railroad stayed with the 2-8-2 design for five more engines through the end of its road-locomotive purchases in 1920. The Mikados were given road numbers 12 and 14 through 18, with…

In February 2020, when the new EBT Foundation, Inc. announced that it was purchasing the East Broad Top Railroad, the group was very specific in saying that one of its first priorities was installing a fire suppression system in the EBT shops. Over the years, the sprawling complex in Rockhill Furnace has been noted by the Smithsonian Institution, the Historic American Engineering Record, and the Society for Industrial Archeology as a significant facility. The “wow” factor for visitors to this late 19th- and early 20th-century facility is apparent the moment one steps inside the complex. But there is more to the shops than just that big building. The shops began soon after the EBT reached Rockhill Furnace in 1873. The railroad purchased a farm where it located a yard and…