Reading Railroad: Map, Logo, History, Rosters

Last revised: September 24, 2026

The Reading, pronounced Redding, was Philadelphia’s anthracite railroad. Chartered in 1833 as the Philadelphia & Reading, it brought hard coal down the Schuylkill to a company port on the Delaware and, by the 1870s, held about a third of Pennsylvania’s anthracite land. The name on the Monopoly board is Reading Railroad. The company people worked for was the Philadelphia & Reading until 1896, the Philadelphia & Reading Railway after the reorganization, and the Reading Company, as an operating railroad, from January 1, 1924.

It was a dense regional system of about 1,300 route-miles, with a New York door over the Jersey Central, the Baltimore & Ohio’s passenger route from Philadelphia to Bound Brook, and one of the heaviest commuter railroads in the East. Anthracite made the company. Bridge freight and a late diesel program carried a shrinking railroad into bankruptcy on November 23, 1971. Its last day as an operating railroad was March 31, 1976. Conrail began the next morning.

Reading Company Alco C630 5305 in a builder portrait in June 1966 wearing the green and yellow diamond

Reading C630 #5305 in a builder portrait, June 1966. Warren Calloway collection. The green-and-yellow diamond was the second-generation scheme. No. 5300 of the same class carried the name Rocket II, and the long hood wore Bee Line Service lettering.

On this page: At a glance · Little Schuylkill · Philadelphia & Reading · The map · Gowen and the coal company · McLeod, the Terminal, 1896 · Jersey Central, B&O, Alphabet Route · January 1, 1924 · Passenger trains and the wires · Diesels and the coal decline · November 23, 1971 · What remains

At a glance

The Reading diamond. Author’s work.

Item	Detail
Railroad	Reading Company. Mark RDG. Logotype Reading Lines. Pronounced Redding
Headquarters	Reading Terminal, Philadelphia
States	Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware. Trains reached Hagerstown, Maryland, on Western Maryland rails
Charter	Philadelphia & Reading Rail Road, April 4, 1833
First trains	Reading–Pottstown May 1, 1838. Philadelphia connection December 5, 1839. Mount Carbon January 1, 1842
Dates	May 1, 1838–March 31, 1976. Conrail April 1, 1976
Gauge	4 ft 8½ in
Route-miles	About 1,300 in the classic era. Original main, Philadelphia to Mount Carbon, about 93 miles
Principal lines	Philadelphia–Reading–Pottsville; Reading–Harrisburg; Reading–Allentown; Philadelphia–Bethlehem; Philadelphia–Bound Brook–Jersey City (CNJ beyond Bound Brook); Port Reading branch; Catawissa line to Newberry Junction; Wilmington & Northern; Harrisburg–Shippensburg, then WM to Hagerstown
Shops	Reading, Pennsylvania. More than 600 locomotives built there, 1845–1948
Last steam	Scheduled passenger May 6, 1952, Pacific 134. Freight T-1s last used in the spring of 1956. Iron Horse Rambles October 25, 1959–October 17, 1964
Fast freight	Bee Line Service, introduced in the mid-1960s
Bankruptcy	November 23, 1971
Successor	Conrail took the railroad. The Reading Company kept non-rail real estate
Rosters	Steam · Diesel

Corporate dates follow the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Hagley’s Reading Company historical note, and Drury. The 1,300-mile figure is the classic-era size given by Trains. Information compiled September 24, 2026.

Little Schuylkill

Anthracite was already moving by water before anyone laid a Reading rail. The Schuylkill Navigation reached Port Clinton from Philadelphia in the 1820s. On February 28, 1826, Pennsylvania chartered the Schuylkill East Branch Navigation Company to continue up the Little Schuylkill toward the Panther Creek mines at Tamaqua. The landscape argued against a canal. A supplement of April 14, 1828 allowed a railroad. On April 23, 1829 the company took the name it kept: the Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad and Coal Company.

Moncure Robinson engineered it. Strap iron on wooden rails, about 22 miles, Tamaqua to Port Clinton. Horse-drawn cars opened the line on November 18, 1831. Two Baltimore-built pleasure cars left Port Clinton at 10 in the morning. Steam followed within about two years and was too heavy for the wooden track. Coal still had to leave the cars at Port Clinton and finish the trip to Philadelphia in a canal boat, and a frozen canal still stopped the trade. The Philadelphia & Reading was the answer to that winter.

Ninety-three miles for coal

The Philadelphia & Reading Rail Road was chartered April 4, 1833, to build along the Schuylkill from Philadelphia through Reading into the southern anthracite field. Canal companies had the politics and the money, and the railroad spent several years getting built anyway. The first section, Reading to Pottstown, opened May 1, 1838. On July 16 the track reached Bridgeport, across the river from Norristown and the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown. On December 5, 1839 the line connected at the Columbia Railroad Bridge with the state-owned Philadelphia & Columbia and entered the city over that railroad to a depot at Broad and Cherry.

The coal end opened January 1, 1842, when the first through train ran from Mount Carbon, at Pottsville, to Philadelphia, about 93 miles. At Mount Carbon the Reading met the earlier Mount Carbon Railroad and the mine branches above Pottsville. On May 17, 1842 a freight branch from the falls of the Schuylkill reached Port Richmond on the Delaware, north of downtown Philadelphia. That was the eastern outlet: company piers, barges, and berths for transatlantic ships. The railroad called Port Richmond the largest privately owned tidewater terminal in the world. Mike Schafer credits the railroad with 42,843 tons of coal in 1844, the year it passed the Schuylkill Canal.

In January 1851, after the state abandoned the Belmont Plane, the Philadelphia & Reading bought the city-side piece of the Philadelphia & Columbia, including the Columbia Railroad Bridge. That was an entrance into Philadelphia. The line west to Columbia went to the Pennsylvania Railroad with the rest of the Main Line of Public Works in 1857.

Branches that became the system

Reading, the city, became the hub because the original main passed through it and the shops grew up there. The lines that mattered after 1858 all left that neighborhood, or left Philadelphia.

The Lebanon Valley Railroad opened from Reading to Harrisburg in January 1858 and was merged into the Philadelphia & Reading on March 20, 1858. In 1869 the East Pennsylvania Railroad added Allentown. On December 1, 1870 the company leased the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown, and with it the Chestnut Hill branch and a second route down the east bank of the Schuylkill. In 1872 the Catawissa Railroad brought the map out to Williamsport and Newberry Junction, and a New York Central connection. The Little Schuylkill itself was leased in 1863 and merged in 1952. The Wilmington & Northern carried the railroad to Wilmington, Delaware.

New York was a lease. The Delaware & Bound Brook was incorporated in New Jersey on May 12, 1874, heir to the old National Railway project for a second Philadelphia–New York route. The Bound Brook Route opened May 1, 1876, in time for Centennial traffic: from a Delaware River bridge at Yardley through Hopewell and Belle Mead to the Jersey Central at Bound Brook. The Philadelphia & Reading leased the North Pennsylvania Railroad and the Delaware & Bound Brook together on May 14, 1879. Philadelphia to Bethlehem, and Philadelphia to Jersey City with a change of railroads at Bound Brook, were now Reading moves. Passengers finished on a ferry from Communipaw.

The Port Reading Railroad, about 20 miles, was completed in September 1892 from the New York line near Bound Brook east to the Arthur Kill. Port Reading gave the company its own New York Harbor piers. South Jersey was a separate map. On April 1, 1889 the Philadelphia & Reading consolidated its seashore lines into the Atlantic City Railroad. In 1933 that company and the Pennsylvania’s West Jersey & Seashore became the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, Pennsylvania two-thirds and Reading one-third. The seashore story stays on that page.

Official 1940 system map of the Reading Company

An official 1940 system map of the Reading. Author’s collection.

Read the map from Philadelphia. The original main runs northwest through Reading to Pottsville and the mine branches. Harrisburg is west of Reading; Allentown and Bethlehem are north. The New York line leaves the suburban district for West Trenton and Bound Brook, with Port Reading as the tidewater stub. The Catawissa line climbs out of the Schuylkill field toward Williamsport. Shippensburg, at the western edge, is where Reading freight handed off to the Western Maryland. Rutherford Yard, just east of Harrisburg, built the blocks. From Shippensburg the Alphabet Route counted 153.6 miles to Philadelphia on Reading iron, and 130.6 miles to Allentown for New York and New England.

Franklin Gowen and a third of the coal land

Franklin B. Gowen became president in 1870. In 1871 he organized the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company and sent it into the Schuylkill field to buy mines. George H. Drury’s figure, and Britannica’s, agree on the scale: about 30 percent of Pennsylvania’s anthracite land, nearly a third, much of it in the Schuylkill and Western Middle districts. The purchases were made at the top of a boom, and a good share of the acreage was expensive coal to mine. The debt from that campaign put the railroad in receivership in 1880, again in 1884, and again in 1893.

Gowen also used the coal company against the miners. The Molly Maguire prosecutions of the 1870s were Pinkerton cases, with James McParlan inside the lodges and Gowen himself in court as a prosecutor. Ten men were hanged in the anthracite counties on June 21, 1877. A month later the national railroad strike reached Reading. On the evening of July 23, in the Seventh Street Cut, militia fired into a crowd. That shooting is the Reading Railroad Massacre, told with the rest of the walkout on the 1877 page. Gowen was out of the presidency before he died on December 13, 1889. The coal debt stayed.

McLeod’s year, and a terminal that opened into a panic

Archibald A. McLeod took the presidency in 1890 and tried to make the Reading the anthracite trunk line. On December 1, 1891 he leased the Lehigh Valley. He took a grip on the Jersey Central and reached for the Lackawanna and the Boston & Maine. Reading Terminal, at 12th and Market in Philadelphia, opened in January 1893 as the monument to that moment. The trainshed and the headhouse replaced a scatter of older Philadelphia stations. The Panic of 1893 arrived with the paint still fresh. The Lehigh Valley lease was canceled on August 8, 1893. The Philadelphia & Reading went back into receivership.

The foreclosure sale was September 23, 1896. Out of it came a cleaner set of boxes. The Philadelphia & Reading Railway was the operating railroad. The Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company kept the mines. The Reading Company, a holding company that had started life in 1871 as the Excelsior Enterprise Company, held the stocks of both. J. P. Morgan’s voting trustees sat on the shares. The railroad that came out of 1896 was the regional anthracite carrier McLeod had hoped to outgrow.

A New York route, and somebody else’s stock

In January 1901 the Reading acquired control of the Jersey Central. That is the arrangement that lasted: one-seat passenger trains from Reading Terminal to Communipaw, Reading crews to Bound Brook, Jersey Central crews beyond, and a ferry to Manhattan. The same route was the Baltimore & Ohio’s way into New York. B&O trains used Reading rails from Philadelphia to Bound Brook and never put a B&O locomotive into Jersey City. The train was the Royal Blue. The B&O left the New York passenger market in April 1958. Its freight kept the route into the 1970s.

The stock control ran the other direction. In 1902–03 the Baltimore & Ohio and the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern together bought a controlling block of Reading stock, more than $60 million of the $140 million outstanding, mostly preferred. The Commercial and Financial Chronicle described them as jointly in virtual control. On January 9, 1903 the New York Times reported that Vanderbilt interests had taken half of the B&O’s Reading holdings, at the instance of the Pennsylvania’s community-of-interest plan under A. J. Cassatt. The public name of that control, for the rest of the century, was the B&O. The Reading stayed a separate operating company. In 1976 the railroad went to Conrail.

George F. Baer was president by 1901. During the 1902 anthracite strike he wrote the letter that followed him: the rights of the laboring man would be protected by “the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.” The strike ended with a presidential commission, not with Baer’s theology. The coal company was still in the same corporation as the railroad, and that was the next fight.

Reading locomotives beside a Western Maryland BL2 and Delaware and Hudson PA units at Hagerstown Maryland in February 1972

Reading power beside Western Maryland BL2 #82 and Delaware & Hudson PAs at Hagerstown, Maryland, February 1972. Jerry Custer photo. Shippensburg and Hagerstown were the Alphabet Route handoff.

The year the holding company became the railroad

The Hepburn Act and a Sherman Act case filed in 1913 aimed at the anthracite combination. The Supreme Court ordered the Reading Company separated from its coal subsidiary on April 26, 1920. The divestiture plan was accepted on June 28, 1923. The Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Corporation was incorporated on December 19, 1923, and took the mines. At the close of business on December 31, 1923, the Philadelphia & Reading Railway and a dozen other rail subsidiaries merged into the Reading Company. On January 1, 1924 the holding company became the operator. President Agnew T. Dice’s report to the stockholders that spring is the document. From that morning, “Reading” on a locomotive means the Reading Company.

Crusader, commuters, and 11,000 volts

The intercity fleet was a short-haul fleet, and a good one. The Crusader, Budd stainless steel, inaugurated in December 1937 between Philadelphia and Jersey City, was the flagship. G-1sa Pacifics 117 and 118 were streamlined to pull it, and FP7s inherited the job. With it ran the Wall Street, the Queen of the Valley through to Harrisburg, the Harrisburg Special, the Schuylkill to Pottsville, the King Coal to Shamokin, and the North Penn to Bethlehem. They were business trains and coal-region trains, Philadelphia and Jersey City at one end and Harrisburg, Pottsville, Shamokin, or Bethlehem at the other.

The money, and the problem, was the Philadelphia suburban service out of Reading Terminal. Steam suburban tanks and backup moves in a stub-end station could not keep the peaks. In the late 1920s the company electrified the suburban district at 11,000 volts, 25 cycles, overhead catenary, fed from one generating station at Wayne Junction. Electric trains began on July 26, 1931. The New York Times counted 140 trains out of Philadelphia that day, on the Bethlehem branch to Lansdale, the Doylestown branch, the New Hope branch to Hatboro, and the New York branch from Jenkintown to West Trenton. Norristown and Chestnut Hill East opened under wire on February 5, 1933. The cars were multiple-unit coaches from Bethlehem Steel, later repainted and nicknamed Blueliners. There was no freight electrification. Plans to carry the wires on to Jersey City, Reading, Harrisburg, or Bethlehem died in the Depression.

Two later extensions, paid for with SEPTA, pushed wire to Fox Chase on the Newtown branch in the mid-1960s and from Hatboro to Warminster in the early 1970s. Between 1907 and 1914 the old street-level approach to the terminal, the Ninth Street Branch, had already been replaced by an elevated four-track line. The commuter railroad was modern. It also lost money, and like every other Northeastern commuter operator the Reading could not set it down.

Bee Line, and a coal trade that left

Drury’s summary of the motive-power turning is the right one. The company bought gas-electrics and diesel switchers early, electrified the suburban trains, and said in public that diesels were fine for switching and the wrong tool for the road. In the same season it bought Electro-Motive FTs, ten A-B sets in January and February 1945, to take the helper district northwest of Reading away from the Mallets. The last scheduled steam passenger train ran May 6, 1952, Pacific 134, Newtown to Philadelphia. T-1 4-8-4s still covered freight peaks into the spring of 1956, and several were leased to the Pennsylvania that fall. The Iron Horse Rambles then kept four of those 4-8-4s in excursion service from October 25, 1959 through October 17, 1964.

The Bee Line Service mark. Author’s work.

Bee Line Service was a 1960s sales idea: an engine on call for a shipper with more than a handful of cars, and a bee on the long hood of the new six-axle power. It was a merchandise product on a railroad whose tonnage had been coal. Dale Woodland’s diesel history puts 1946 anthracite at 16 million tons, with other freight around 30 million, and the hard-coal figure under 2 million tons by 1975. Home heating, the mines, and the breakers all went the same direction. What replaced the coal, as much as anything did, was bridge traffic: Alphabet Route freights off the Western Maryland, Jersey Central and B&O traffic at the New York end, and the Pennsylvania’s interchange at Harrisburg and Philadelphia.

Reading GP40-2 3671 leading empties for the Grace Mine at Elverson Pennsylvania on February 19 1976

GP40-2 #3671 and two sisters with empties for the Grace Mine at Elverson, Pennsylvania, February 19, 1976. Ronald Johnson photo. The railroad had six weeks left.

November 23, 1971

Penn Central filed on June 21, 1970. The Reading, which lived on interchange with the Pennsylvania side of that merger, filed on November 23, 1971. The Jersey Central and the Lehigh Valley were already in the same courts. The United States Railway Association’s answer was one railroad. Conrail started at 12:01 a.m. on April 1, 1976 and took the Reading’s rail network with the others. A set of GP39-2s delivered in late 1974 never wore Conrail blue. They went to the Delaware & Hudson. Almost everything else that was still on the roster conveyed.

Official 1969 system map of the Reading Company by Rand McNally

An official 1969 system map of the Reading, by Rand McNally. Author’s collection. This is the railroad Conrail inherited seven years later.

What remains

Norfolk Southern, in the Conrail split of June 1, 1999, took the Harrisburg Line and the Reading Line, the old spines between Philadelphia, Reading, Harrisburg, and Allentown. CSX took other pieces. Reading & Northern rebuilt a regional railroad on the anthracite-region branches, including the Catawissa country and the old main toward Pottsville, and it runs T-1 2102 on its own Iron Horse Rambles. SEPTA took the Philadelphia commuter operation from Conrail on January 1, 1983. The last trains left Reading Terminal in November 1984. The Center City Commuter Connection opened on November 12, 1984, and the old Reading side began running through to the former Pennsylvania side. West Trenton, Doylestown, Warminster, Chestnut Hill East, Norristown, and Fox Chase are still electric railroads. The headhouse and Reading Terminal Market stayed at 12th and Market. The trainshed was built into the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Hagley’s note on the estate is the corporate ending: viable rail lines went to Conrail, and the reorganized Reading Company kept real estate and other non-rail assets. The locomotives are on the other two pages. The steam roster is Drury’s post-1900 class grid, from Camelback Consolidations through the T-1s. The diesel roster is the all-time internal-combustion list, with builder serials and order numbers.

Sources

George H. Drury, Guide to North American Steam Locomotives, revised edition, Reading chapter, pp. 275–278. Corporate outline, Wootten firebox, and the end of steam.
Commercial and Financial Chronicle: foreclosure sale September 23, 1896; CNJ control, January 1901; B&O and Lake Shore stock, 1902–03; Port Reading Railroad completed September 1892; merger effective January 1, 1924, report of Agnew T. Dice.
Hagley Museum and Library, Reading Company records: Excelsior Enterprise holding company, 1896 reorganization, 1923 coal divestiture, Conrail conveyance, real estate retained.
Hagley finding aid, Delaware & Bound Brook Railroad: incorporated May 12, 1874; opened May 1, 1876; leased with the North Penn on May 14, 1879.
U.S. Supreme Court segregation order, April 26, 1920; divestiture plan accepted June 28, 1923.
New York Times, July 26, 1931, first day of suburban electric service; January 9, 1903, the Vanderbilt share of the B&O’s Reading stock.
Trains, “Reading Company: A railroad history,” for the classic-era size of about 1,300 route-miles and Bee Line Service.
Mike Schafer, Classic American Railroads, Volume III, for the 1844 coal tonnage. Dale Woodland, Reading Diesels, for the 1946 and 1975 anthracite figures carried on the previous version of this page.
This site’s Crusader, Iron Horse Rambles, Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, and Alphabet Route pages for those stories.

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