West Penn Railways - History

History

West Penn Railways consisted of 339 miles (546 km) of electric trolley railway at its peak. It operated in a well populated mining region of rugged mountainous western Pennsylvania and connected numerous towns and villages with hourly or better transport from its north end towns at McKeesport, Latrobe and Trafford through the larger towns of Greensburg, Mt Pleasant, Connellsville, Scottdale, and Uniontown to southern most Fairchild and Martin. A branch extended to Brownsville on the Ohio River. Some of its predecessor trolley companies operated as early as 1889 in the Greensburg area and as early as 1893 in the Wheeling area. West Penn Railways Company, as a separate corporate entity from its parent power company, was chartered on February 18, 1904. It operated a very active and inexpensive regional transportation service until August 9, 1952, when its last trolley ran on its one time busiest Uniontown to Greensburg line. Because much of its fare generating business was to bring residents of outlying areas into nearby towns for shopping and entertainment, particularly to see movies in the 1930s and 1940s, the West Penn's business declined with the decline in area mine and coking employment, the construction of better roads, and increased car ownership and use. An unsubstantiated story holds that once television reached the region, West Penn's management, facing an obvious future of fewer and fewer riders due to people staying home to watch TV, decided to abandon railway operations quickly. At one point near abandonment, the still well maintained big orange trolleys ominously carried signs reading, "To keep the 5c fare we need more riders".