Jersey Shore, Pine Creek and Buffalo Railway

Jersey Shore, Pine Creek and Buffalo Railway
Locale	Tioga County, Pennsylvania
Dates of operation	1883 – 1884
Successor line	Pine Creek Railway
Track gauge	4 ft 8½ in (1435 mm) (standard gauge)
Headquarters	Wellsboro

The Jersey Shore, Pine Creek and Buffalo Railway was a railroad built in the early 1880s to give the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad access to the coal regions around Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It was originally planned as part of a connecting line between the East Coast of the United States and Buffalo, New York.

Reading sponsorship

The railroad was incorporated on February 17 1870 to run from the vicinity of Williamsport to Jersey Shore, up Pine Creek and down the Allegheny River to Port Allegany, as part of a route to Buffalo.

On December 1 1871, Sobieski Ross, one of the JSPC&B's promoters, wrote to George B. McClellan, extolling the advantages of the route. McClellan was then president of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, which shipped petroleum to New York City over the Erie Railway. The Erie's service was felt to be unsatisfactory, and the A&GW potentially interested in a new partner. The eastern end of the A&GW was at Salamanca, New York, about 35 miles from Port Allegany along the Allegheny River, and could easily be extended along the river to connect with the JSPC&B. At Newberry, near Williamsport, traffic could be routed onto the Catawissa Railroad and then the Central Railroad of New Jersey to reach the New York area.

Ross's letter gives a good idea of the route planned. He says that it would descend on the western side via Mill Creek, which meets the Allegheny River at Coudersport. The closest approach to the Pine Creek watershed would leave Mill Creek to climb along Nelson Run. A summit tunnel 2300 feet long was planned, which would suffice to carry a line from the headwaters of Nelson Run into Splash Dam Hollow, then down Lyman Run to the West Branch Pine Creek, reaching the main stream of Pine Creek at Galeton.

Besides the JSPC&B's value as a trunk line, Ross hopefully anticipated the development of traffic along the line from lumbering, coal mining, and iron manufacturing. In the end, only lumbering and tanning would play a significant role in the industry of the area. The coal beds along the Allegheny River west of Coudersport were proclaimed "worthless" by the State Geological Survey in 1885, nor could the local iron ore deposits be economically worked.

While grading of the JSPC&B began on June 12 1873, but the Panic of 1873 soon brought a halt to construction. The unfinished line appeared in other grandiose rail schemes: the Gaines and State Line Rail Road, incorporated 1875, would have built north from the JSPC&B at Gaines as part of a line to Hornellsville and Geneva, New York.

Fall Brook and New York Central control

During the early 1880s, the New York Central and a consortium of coal companies from Tioga County, Pennsylvania and New York State embarked upon a bold venture. The coal companies were plagued by labor disputes, and the deposits they mined were diminishing. The NYC feared that its rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, would use its control over coal shipments from central Pennsylvania to inflate the price of that fuel. The solution decided upon was that the coal companies, backed by the NYC, would build a new rail line into the vicinity of Clearfield and open new mines there. Coal would move north over the new line to the NYC. The JSPC&B would be a key link in the new extension.

The Fall Brook Coal Company, which already operated an extensive rail network in Tioga County, would be the first operator of the new line. Gaining control of the JSPC&B, it exploited a provision of the railroad's charter allowing for branches of up to thirty miles in any county traversed by the main line. The new connection would leave the Fall Brook's line at Stokesdale Junction, near Wellsboro, and follow Marsh Creek to Pine Creek and the original route at Ansonia, and then pass downstream to Jersey Shore and the Reading connection at Newberry.

The remainder of the grading was sold off, and in fact was the first part of the route to operate: the Coudersport and Port Allegany Railroad opened on the old grade between those two points in 1882. The JSPC&B continued construction on the route from Newberry to Stokesdale Junction, which ran through the spectacular Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania below Ansonia. The new line was opened on July 1 1883, and formally leased to the Fall Brook Coal Company in 1884. The company's name was changed to the Pine Creek Railway on June 6 1884, and it became part of the Fall Brook's system.

Most of the rest of the planned route between Ansonia and Coudersport saw track laid by the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad and dependent logging lines. However, it was not connected so as to form a through route, and the summit tunnel was never built.

The lines operated by the Fall Brook Coal Company, including the Pine Creek Ry., were leased by the New York Central in 1899, and were consolidated into the New York Central Railroad in a 1914 corporate reorganization. They were operated by the NYC as the Fall Brook District, Pennsylvania Division. The Pine Creek line was one of those taken over by Conrail in 1976, but the last train ran on the route on October 7 1988. After the removal of the tracks, the right-of-way was converted to the Pine Creek Rail Trail.