Tracking train line's long story

As a boy, Hugh Lofting had heard stories about the old railroad - the steam trains that carried both freight and passengers, the stations at hamlets and crossroads, the cattle delivered to the King Ranch. His grandmother Ida told him about the hobos who wandered over to her farm and how she served them coffee in mason jars. Sometimes, while walking sections of the railroad's route, he would discover trestle piers and bridge abutments, railroad ties and mile markers.

Then, about a year ago, while plying his duties as road superintendent of West Marlborough Township, at the epicenter of Chester County horse country, Lofting noticed something gleaming in the muck of a bridle path where it crossed a two-lane blacktop road. He knew the path followed the railroad's former right-of-way, but there in the horseshoe-pocked mud was a glimmer of a steel rail. With a spade, he began excavating. Soon, he had unearthed not only the rail's partner but also the rails of a parallel set of tracks.

Lofting was excited. Clearly, this was where the tracks split to form a siding for the now-vanished creamery at Green Lawn.

That chance discovery ignited what Lofting calls "a passion, a small obsession." Although he boasts a distinguished literary pedigree (his great-grandfather and namesake wrote the popular Dr. Dolittle books) and was mildly interested in American history in high school, Lofting, 30, was more comfortable fixing farm machinery. Today, much to his surprise and delight, he has become an avid amateur historian and railroad archaeologist.

"I'm reliving history now," Lofting said. "I've become part of it."

He has collected a file full of articles and documents about the railroad. He has walked long sections of the route, and relentlessly he is plumbing the memories of township old-timers.

"I ask so many questions about the railroad people get bored with me," Lofting confessed.

But so intense is his fascination that Lofting can't resist. Exceptionally congenial, he will occasionally violate his nature by waiving small talk when stalking railroad-related information. In truth, the railroad is something of a pretext, a reflection of his affection for his idyllic 17-square-mile domain, and the way it has and hasn't changed over the years.

West Marlborough is, in Lofting's words, "an island in an ocean of development." West of the quaint village of Unionville, in southern Chester County, it's a pastoral preserve of rolling hills and vast open space where horses and foxhounds outnumber the gentry, and trust funds and 20-acre zoning have kept the back roads gravelly and rough and the sweeping vistas blessedly clear of stucco starter castles.

"West Marlborough is really sleepy now, but in the 1940s and '50s it was booming," Lofting said. "I'm interested in how self-sufficient life was out here, back when people had to grind their own feed and churn their own butter and they couldn't just jump in the car."

Who knows what West Marlborough would look like today had the late 19th-century railroad flourished. But from the start, the venture seemed ill-fated and misbegotten. During its lifetime, the railroad had several names and corporate parents, but it came to be known locally as the Pomeroy & Newark Railroad. Its erstwhile passenger car earned the diminutive "Pumpsie Doodle" or "Pommy Diddle," suggesting that locals viewed the railroad more as cute curiosity than engine of economic transformation. In time, folks began referring to it as "the railroad that should never have been built."

Envisioned as a shortcut for transporting coal to the Delaware River south of Wilmington, the railroad was built by two different companies between 1868 and 1873. The section that runs through West Marlborough began at the village of Pomeroy, on the Pennsylvania Railroad's east-west main line between Parkesburg and Coatesville, and wove its way south to Newark, Del., where it connected with a rail line to Delaware City. Constructed as cheaply as possible, the railroad followed natural water courses and traversed swamps and wetlands. This required numerous wooden bridges and trestles - 65 in the 26 miles between Pomeroy and Newark. According to lore, there were more bridges per linear mile along the P&N line than any other railroad in America.

From the outset, the railroad lost money. By 1878, it was failing to meet daily expenses, and bankruptcy loomed. For passengers, the trip between Pomeroy and Newark, though undeniably scenic, could be a life-threatening adventure. Derailments - caused by trespassing livestock, broken axles and spreading tracks - were frequent. In late 1876, the lone passenger car tumbled off a bridge and into a creek, then caught fire, injuring several patrons severely. A month later, the passenger car was "thrown down an embankment several feet high, and the passengers knocked about in the most reckless manner," the Daily Local News reported at the time.

At one time, two trains a day shuttled between Pomeroy and Newark. A 1915 schedule shows the 26-mile journey took 1 hour and 35 minutes. The pokey pace prompted one rustic wag to observe that P&N trains "run tri-weekly - one week to go up, and two weeks to come down."

In West Marlborough, the train stopped at four stations: Doe Run, Springdell, Green Lawn and Clonmell, all of which have been erased by time. The other day, Lofting, wearing a tractor cap and trousers unabashedly stained by his labors, visited those sites, as well as other places where the railroad once passed. Included was Green Lawn, where Lofting had spied the interred rails and the siding that served the phantom creamery.

"Milk, cream and butter were loaded onto freight cars here and chilled at Clonmell with ice cut in winter from a nearby frozen pond," Lofting said.

At a closed road that had reverted to a bridle path, he hiked up to the crest of a ridge to see more railroad ruins - a set of concrete abutments erected in 1911 when the original wooden bridge was replaced. The trail was littered with nuggets of slag from the steel mill in Coatesville.

"They used this stuff for track ballast and to fill gullies and depressions," Lofting said. Building the railroad was an audacious undertaking that required enormous amounts of labor. "All done with strong backs and mules," Lofting marveled.

Surveying a valley of undulant meadows and tidy farmsteads, he pointed out where the rail line coped with the rising terrain by curling into double horseshoe curves. The line was notorious for its many curves, which, however graceful and spectacular, limited the size and speed of trains. During World War I, long coal trains often stalled and had to be rescued by booster locomotives.

With the growing popularity of auto travel, the P&N ceased transporting passengers in 1928. Parts of the line south of Avondale and Landenberg were shortly abandoned. But the rail line from Pomeroy to Doe Run (officially the Pomeroy branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad by then) enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1940s and '50s, when it shipped cattle from the King Ranch in Texas to Buck and Doe Run Valley Farms, the local name for the 17,000-acre King Ranch spread in Chester County.

"This place had lots of natural springs and a long growing season," Lofting said. "It was perfect for fattening steers."

In Doe Run, the specially bred Santa Gertrudis cattle gorged on the lush grass for six months, gaining about 350 pounds, before being sent to the slaughterhouse and dinner platters in Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia. The grazing operation ended in 1984, Lofting said, and most of the land was subdivided and sold as conservation lots.

As he spoke about the railroad, Lofting was by turns enthusiastic and wistful.

"I'd give anything to be around here during that time," he said, referring to the heyday of the King Ranch, when cattle arrived at Doe Run by train. His grandfather, the late Colin "Skipper" Lofting, was one of the original King Ranch cowboys.

Lofting realizes he can't re-create the past. The best he can do is appreciate it. Someday soon, he intends to walk the railroad from the top to bottom of West Marlborough - to "grab a backpack, a couple bottles of water, a machete, and have at it." He dreams of recruiting volunteers to open up the entire glorious right-of-way. For now, he will keep adding to what he knows, slaking a thirst that both baffles and amuses him.

"It's funny," he said. "For 25 years, the only things that went through my mind were tractors, dirt bikes and sex. Now there's this thing."