Locomotives

Former units

Several engines not part of the collection have visited the Scranton site: NYS&W #142, BM&R #425 (now Reading Blue Mountain and Northern 425), Lowville & Beaver River Shay #8, former RDG T-1 #2102 (restored and operable by Reading Blue Mountain and Northern), Milwaukee Road 261, PRR 1361 and NKP 765.^[11] "Peppersass" No.1 from Mount Washington Cog Railway visited the Steamtown Scranton site during Railfest 2016, and revisited again during March 11 to 13, 2019.

New England roots

F. Nelson Blount, the heir to the largest seafood processor in the United States, was an avid railroad enthusiast. When he was 17, he wrote a book on steam power; later, he amassed one of the largest collections of vintage steam locomotives in the United States. By 1964, part of his collection — 25 steam locomotives from the United States and Canada, 10 other locomotives, and 25 pieces of rolling stock — was housed at North Walpole, New Hampshire.^[42] The Monadnock, Steamtown & Northern Railroad, as the enterprise was then called,^[43] ran excursions between Keene and Westmoreland, New Hampshire.^[42]

After failing in 1962 to convince the State of New Hampshire to take over control of the bulk of the collection,^[44] Blount established the "Steamtown Foundation for the Preservation of Steam and Railroad Americana" to operate Steamtown, USA in 1964. The non-profit, charitable, educational organization was to have nine un-salaried directors, including the five incorporators: Blount, former New Hampshire governor Lane Dwinell; Emile Bussiere; Robert L. Mallat Jr., mayor of Keene; and Bellows Falls Municipal Judge Thomas P. Salmon, who later became governor of Vermont. The president of the Campbell Soup Company, William B. Murphy, who had also served as National Chairman of Radio Free Europe, and the vice president of Blount Seafood, Fredrick Richardson, were among the other directors. The first order of business for the Steamtown Foundation was to acquire the Blount collection at North Walpole, and move it to property once owned by the Rutland Railroad, in Bellows Falls, Vermont.^[42]

Blount was killed on August 31, 1967, when his private airplane hit a tree during an emergency landing, in Marlborough, New Hampshire.^[45] By that time, a good deal of Blount's collection was controlled by the Steamtown Foundation and had been moved to Bellows Falls. One of Blount's corporations, the Green Mountain Railroad (GMRC), controlled the tracks that lay between Walpole, Bellows Falls and Chester, Vermont, which Steamtown was to use for its excursions. When Blount died, most of the controlling stock of the GMRC was transferred to the president of the railroad, Robert Adams.^[46] By 1976, the relationship between Steamtown and GMRC was strained as the two organizations fought over maintenance of the tracks, which were owned by the state of Vermont.^[47] In addition, the steam excursions that Steamtown sponsored violated Vermont's pollution regulations, but the railroad was able to operate for several years under waivers issued by the state.^[48][49] By 1978, the Steamtown Foundation had begun scouting for a new location for Steamtown, USA.^[50]

In 1980, Ray Holland, the Chairman of the Board of Steamtown Foundation, resigned after accusing the board of incompetence. His resignation was followed by that of Robert Barbera, a long-time director of the board.^[51] In the year that followed, Steamtown did not run excursions. Don Ball Jr., had taken over direction of Steamtown by this time and discovered that the excursion train did not meet federal safety guidelines. In 1981, despite its vast holdings of vintage railroad stock, Steamtown had only 17,000 visitors, while Connecticut's Essex Valley Railroad, which ran two small engines, had 139,000 visitors.^[52] Even in its best year, 1973, the Vermont location had attracted only 65,000 visitors.^[53]

When questions about Steamtown, USA in New England are posed, the official response of the National Park Service is:

Steamtown National Historic Site was created in 1986 to preserve the history of steam railroading in America, concentrating on the era 1850 through 1950. This is the mission of the park. The park was not created to preserve the history of Steamtown USA. Our site does touch on the history of railroad preservation, specifically in our History Museum. The work of F. Nelson Blount, creator of the former Steamtown USA, and other pioneers of the steam preservation movement, is a part (albeit a small part) of the story Steamtown NHS has been charged with preserving.^[54]

Move to Scranton

Self-syndicated newspaper columnist Michael McManus once said that his goal in writing his weekly column was "to suggest answers to problems of the old industrial states."^[55] In March 1982 a substantial article by McManus appeared in the Bangor Daily News. In the article, McManus proposed several reasons why a city, like Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Scranton, might benefit from a tourist attraction like Steamtown. McManus went on to explain why the business was failing in Vermont: past failed management, an isolated location and the lack of signs on Interstate 91, which the state opposed.^[52] Moreover, the roof of the largest storage shed on the property had collapsed under heavy snow the previous winter, damaging several pieces of equipment.^[52] Among the injured were CP Rail No. 1293, which had served on Vermont's "Bicentennial Train" and on the movie Terror Train (1979),^[56] and the Meadow River Lumber Company No. 1 Shay.^[57]

Asked by McManus to describe the value of the Steamtown collection, Jim Boyd, editor of Railfan & Railroad magazine, said, "Everything there is no longer obtainable anywhere, whether it is the "Big Boy" [Union Pacific No. 4012] or the Rahway Valley No. 15, a nice-sized locomotive any museum would give a right arm for. Most of the other large collections do not have any serviceable equipment."^[52] McManus added "What is at stake is more than tourism and jobs. It is a significant part of America's past before the welder's torch is turned on the likes of the 1877 'Prince of Liege', the rare Union Pacific diamond stack, etc. The steel alone is worth $3 million."^[52]

In June 1983, McManus wrote about Steamtown again, this time announcing that Scranton had taken his suggestion. He said that Springfield, Massachusetts, and Willimantic, Connecticut, had also vied for the collection. "But on May 24, Scranton signed a contract to get it, pledging to raise $2 million to cover the cost of moving 40 ancient steam engines and 60 cars, few of which are operable, and to create a museum."^[55] On October 23, 1983, Steamtown sponsored its last Vermont excursion, using Canadian Pacific 1246 to pull a "dozen or so cars" on a 100-mile (160 km) round trip from Riverside station to Ludlow, Vermont,^[58] and Scranton began raising money for the move.

When Scranton agreed to take on Steamtown, it was estimated that the museum and excursion business would attract 200,000 to 400,000 visitors to the city every year.^[59] In anticipation of this economic boon, the city and a private developer spent $13 million to renovate the DL&W station and transform it into a Hilton hotel, at a time when the unemployment rate in the city was 13 percent.^[60] Only 60,000 visitors showed up at Steamtown in 1987, and the 1988 excursions were canceled. After only three years, it was $2.2 million in debt^[61] and facing bankruptcy.^[62] Part of the problem was the cost of restoration of the new property and the deteriorating equipment. In addition, while the tourists in Vermont had enjoyed the sights of cornfields, farms, covered bridges, a waterfall and a gorge on a Steamtown excursion,^[63] the Scranton trip to Moscow, Pennsylvania, cut through one of the nation's largest junkyards, an eyesore described by Ralph Nader as "the eighth wonder of the world".^[64]

Nationalization

In 1986, the U.S. House of Representatives, under the urging of Scranton native Representative Joseph M. McDade,^[62] voted to approve the spending of $8 million to study the collection and to establish the site as a National Historic Site (NHS).^[6] The National Park Service (NPS) consequently conducted historical research on the Steamtown Foundation's equipment in 1987 and 1988. This research was used for a Scope of Collections Statement for Steamtown NHS and was published in 1991 under the title Steamtown Special History Study. Aside from providing concise histories of the equipment, the report also made recommendations as to whether or not each piece belonged in the now government-funded collection.^[65] Historical significance to the United States was a criterion of the recommendations. Many of the pieces of equipment that did not meet the report's recommendations were sold or traded for pieces that had historical significance to the region.^[66]

The adoption of Steamtown as a federal endeavor caused controversy. On November 23, 1991, an article in The New York Times said, "The provision for the park was inserted into a huge appropriations bill at a late-night meeting near the end of the legislative session in October 1986. Congressional authorizing committees, which are charged with setting policy and reviewing such proposals, were bypassed, and the Park Service did not conduct its customary two-year review of proposed new parks."^[7] The article noted that "a number of historians and museum curators around the nation call Steamtown a second-rate collection of trains on a third-rate site. They say that while such historic recreations have a place, the Federal Government should not be financing them simply because influential members of Congress want them for their districts."^[7] It said that James M. Ridenour, director of the Park Service, said that Steamtown was among other projects that the agency neither needed nor wanted, adding that the same collection was rejected by them when it was still in Vermont because it "lacked historic importance".^[7] Aside from the $73 million that had at that point been proposed for the development of the project, there would also be a projected annual operation cost of $6.5 million. A December 17, 1991, editorial reported that the development appropriation had been capped at $53 million, and said the Steamtown project had siphoned resources "from the Park Service's worthier, maintenance-starved projects."^[67]

William W. Scranton, former governor of Pennsylvania and descendant of the founders of Scranton, along with J. A. Panuska, president of the University of Scranton, responded to the Times' coverage with a letter to the editor. Published on January 8, 1992, the letter argued that the statement, first made by a former Smithsonian curator, that "Steamtown was a second-rate collection on a third-rate site," was unfounded.^[9] Scranton and Panuska wrote, "The collection of 29 steam engines and 82 other railroad cars and equipment is the third largest in the country, the only one available for commemorating the industrialization of America in a historic setting."^[9] They said that the 19th-century American Industrial Revolution was under-represented in the National Park System^[9] and further said that

Scranton is the only city in the Eastern United States with the vestiges of the era of industrialization (1840-1920) in plain sight, 40 acres in the middle of downtown, with car shops, locomotive shops, roundhouse, turntable, grand passenger station, a working yard, iron furnaces, passenger excursions — the whole works and a restored coal mine nearby. There is no other site like it. This city [Scranton] was founded because of its iron ore and its ability to produce rails (previously imported from England), followed by its graduation to a coal and steel economy. It is a graphic demonstration of the industrial period of our country, an excellent site for Americans to learn about their history.^[9]

The site they were referring to had mostly belonged to the DL&W, which joined the Erie Railroad in 1960 to form the Erie Lackawanna Railway. The site eventually passed to Conrail, and was purchased by the city of Scranton as the site for Steamtown, USA. The site included 13 buildings built between 1865 and 1937 that were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[3] Wrote Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times, "Scranton was once served by five railroads, an almost unthinkable luxury for a city of just over 80,000 people. The passenger trains stopped decades ago, but one memory remains: the Lackawanna's elegant station, just up the street from Steamtown, completed in 1908 and converted into a hotel through a public-private partnership in 1983."^[68]

In April 1992, Newsweek printed an excerpt from a soon-to-be-published book about pork-barrel politics called Adventures in Porkland. It said of Representative McDade's leadership in securing funds for Steamtown:

McDade has achieved the dream of most pork-barrel congressmen, a living memorial, indeed two: the University of Scranton's new Joseph M. McDade Center for Technology and Applied Research, and the county's McDade Park, with its Anthracite Coal Museum. But the congressman's crowning achievement is a historic theme park called Steamtown.^[8]

The article also repeated the charge that the collection was second-rate. It went on to say that at the site there was little evidence of the $40 million that had been spent to date; that several of the pieces were from the 1940s and 1950s, not the 19th century, which was the time period that was supposedly being preserved; that some of the better pieces of equipment were Canadian, not U.S.; that other museums, already in existence, were already fulfilling the historical mission of Steamtown; and that other NPS projects like Yosemite and Yellowstone were in desperate need of funding.^[8] Nevertheless, in February 1992, the House of Representatives voted against dropping the project from the NPS and instead voted to add an additional $14 million to its funding.^[69]

By 1994, one of the earlier skeptics of the Steamtown project, Railfan & Railroad magazine associate editor Mike DelVecchio, who had visited the site, had changed sides in the debate saying, "When it is finished, Steamtown will be the only place in America that can recreate the experience of mainline steam railroading."^[5] The director of Steamtown, Roger G. Kennedy, said, "those who concentrated on the pork-barrel politics of the development of the park were ignorant of the history."^[5] Len Barcousky, writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, described that history saying: "It was steam locomotives that unified the nation in the century between 1850 and 1950. Maintained in giant roundhouses in a hundred cities like Scranton, the smoke-belching engines carried the people and the goods that made possible the Industrial Revolution."^[5]

Operation as an NHS

By 1995, Steamtown had been acquired and developed by the NPS at a total cost of $66 million.^[61][62] In June 1995, the newest National Historic Site was ready for its grand opening. Michigan's only surviving steam locomotive, no. 1225, was to arrive on July 1 for the occasion.^[70] In November 1995, The New York Times printed a favorable review written by Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse, who had visited the site with her husband and daughter. Wrote Greenhouse, "The pleasure of the park is to see trains not only as one might see them in a museum but to see them in motion. Steamtown is a dynamic museum, with locomotives moving regularly from the yard into the park's architectural centerpiece, the roundhouse".^[68] Visitor attendance in its first year was 212,000.^[71]

By 2008, the federal government had spent a total of $176 million on Steamtown, which had an annual operating cost of $5.2 million. Visitor attendance had declined since its opening year to 61,178 in 2006.^[71] Many of the locomotives and passenger cars contained asbestos,^[10] a carcinogen.^[72] The federal government pledged $1.5 million for its removal, to be disbursed in 2011, and more money for restoration of the equipment, providing the money was matched by non-federal funds.^[10] Attendance rebounded in the 2010s, reaching 111,000 in 2011.^[71]

From October 1 through 16, 2013, Steamtown was closed, along with the rest of the National Park system, as part of the United States federal government shutdown of 2013.^[73]

In 2021, Steamtown completed a two-year, $1.6 million restoration of its largest engine, Union Pacific Big Boy #4012.^[74]