.: About the Book :.
.:Message From the Author:.
.: Ordering :.

Ghost Rails III
Electrics
Upper Ohio Valley
Youngstown and
Ohio River Railroad

Ghost Rails Volume IV
Industrial Shortlines

Ghost Rails VI:
Harmony Route

Where Earth
Dissolves like Snow
The Keystone
Driller Story

Summary:

Ghost Rails V PRR Butler Branch and Winfield Railroad is an unparalleled and an in depth history that has touched all of Western Pennsylvania and even America.  192 glossy pages with hundreds of then and now photos and maps, including 16 pages of color, uncover a first time history close to all our backyards. Today one can walk the PRR right of way via the Butler Freeport Community Trail and within Ghost Rails V the history is told almost mile by mile, villages and creeks, oil, coal, and pickles, steep grades and elevations, and an iron ore trail left behind.  For 25 years, the Butler Branch, part of the PRR Conemaugh Division, was the 21 miles of railroad that supplied the iron ore to the United States Steel Saxonburg sintering plant for the steel mills of the Mon Valley. It was the true industrial gateway to America.   Beginning along the Allegheny River and Buffalo Creeks, this is the detailed history, 1870 to 1990, and what remains behind in 2009.

Ghost Rails V begins at Butler Junction, Freeport, and across the Allegheny River, at the what was once the isolated PRR Kiski Yards.  It then follows Buffalo Creek, coal industries, the high and low grades, Guggenheimer whiskey, brick industries along steep railroad grades to Dilks, home of the Great Belt oil industry.  From Dilks, once the home of KD tower, it was a down hill to Butler, past coal mines, a wye, across diamonds with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the PRR Butler station on Monroe Street.

At the diamond on Kittanning Street, detailed pages with original documents and blueprints, interior and exterior and black and white as well as color photos celebrate the last tower VO standing on the old Conemaugh Division.  It is a truly a tower tribute.

The right of way pages pass a Conrail wye and then crosses the diamond to B&LE territory showing transfers that twenty years ago moved 30,000 cars a year.  From this point, the author takes the reader a half dozen miles south to the once mammoth USS sintering plant, destination of Penn Central “Z iron ore trains.”  Photos show plant and yard layout, the making of sinter, loads in and out, and the final collapse of the Saxonburg plant.  It is truly a history of ghost rails to brownfields documented in color and black and white, the rise and final fall.

Interviews with Herb Kerr, senior engineer on the Conemaugh Division, who piloted the steep grades of Butler Branch, and the last PRR train to Butler, and Carl Greeco, maintenance Superintendent of the Saxonburg sintering plant, who supervised the mile high Venezuela ore piles and the final demise in 1995, simply intensify this industrial gateway, now our heritage.

Eighty pages of the book are dedicated to the 8 mile Winfield Railroad, an industrial giant that lasted for nearly ninety years, tucked away in the Rough Run valley off Buffalo Creek and the PRR Butler Branch at Winfield Junction.  From limestone to cement, horse manure to mushrooms, the private railroad of F. W. Mckee that intertwined with the PRR was a first rate survival.  Right of way ghosts tell the rest of the story today.

 

Message from the Author:

Ghost Rails V the PRR Butler Branch and Winfield Railroad is my 5th book in the series of abandon railroads and their industries along the Ohio and Pa. state line.  In actuality Ghost Rails V is my ninth book, and number ten Ghost Rails VI The Harmony Route is near completed on the PC.

It is amazing the number of doors and friendships writing and researching old railroad grades has opened.  With Ghost Rails V, Eric Johnson of Bethel Park was a key source; he was introduced to me by my neighbor and railroad photographer David Baer. And, Joe Curran of Brady’s Bend, a key source of info on Ghost Rails II Western Allegheny, provided knowledge of Pullman Standard for the book where he was a foreman.  Then of course, Gary Moser was a constant throughout the writing as we put in lots of miles of travel by auto and hiking throughout the Winfield Railroad Rough Run valley (accompanied by unwanted ticks) and walking the Butler Freeport Community Trail, the old Butler Branch grade.  For those interested the trail is spectacular for hiking and biking as well as steeped in grand history.

The past year was rough with my wife ill, but recovering, and even changing churches.  My Grandson Adair is at Waynesburg University and was definitely a change at home.  He is missed.

Retirement from teaching English at Blackhawk for a number of years now has been busy with the preservation of history in these books.  I have been too busy to miss teaching which I enjoyed.  Life in the country continues to go well, but with the rough winters and in our back country location, we may seek “a closer to civilization home.”

Enough work remains, however, for 5 more volumes, at least, for the preservation of our state line history.  I find growing up in Ellwood City that Ghost Rails VI Harmony will bring me back to my first railroad, the Harmony Line, where my first right of way adventures began.  This book is well under way, and I feel my finest.

 

 

Copyright 2009 Wayne A. Cole
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book including web elements and images may be reproduced by any means or appear in any media without permission from the author and publisher, Wayne A. Cole, except for reviews or excerpts.