History
The oldest portion of the Harrisburg Subdivision, along the west side of the Schuylkill from Grays Ferry southwest to the Philadelphia Subdivision, was opened in 1838 by the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. A new PW&B line, now the Northeast Corridor, opened in 1872; the old line was leased to the Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road the next year.
From Arsenal east over the Arsenal Bridge and south along 25th Street to near Packer Avenue, the Pennsylvania Railroad built the Delaware Extension, completing it in 1862. The rest of the line, south and east to Greenwich Yard, opened in 1900 as the Schuylkill River Branch Extension to serve League Island.
The part of the Harrisburg Subdivision north of Zoo was built by the Junction Railroad and opened in 1863, connecting to what was then the main line of the Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road at Belmont. The Junction Railroad also built the piece from Arsenal southwest to Grays Ferry, opened in 1866. Through leases and mergers, the Junction Railroad became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the part from Zoo to Belmont was the Belmont Branch. The West Philadelphia Elevated, completed in 1904, was built by the PRR as a separate freight route through the 30th Street Station area between Arsenal and Zoo Interlockings.
The entire line became part of Conrail in 1976; the Delaware Extension, West Philadelphia Elevated, and Belmont Branch were grouped with the former Reading Company line to Reading and Harrisburg as the Harrisburg Line. In 1998, Conrail reconstructed the south end of the line, adding a direct connection from the Chester Secondary to CSX's Philadelphia Subdivision and allowing CSX-Conrail freights to use the High Line. The entire line from south of Arsenal to Belmont was assigned to CSX in the 1999 breakup of Conrail, while the rest of the Harrisburg Line became a Norfolk Southern Railway line.
Read more about this topic: Harrisburg Subdivision
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)