Knox and Kane Railroad

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Knox and Kane Railroad
Reporting marks	KKRR
Locale	Northwestern Pennsylvania
Dates of operation	1986–present (service suspended in 2006)
Track gauge	4 ft 8½ in (1435 mm) (standard gauge)
Headquarters	Marienville, Pennsylvania

The Knox and Kane Railroad was a short railway line in Pennsylvania operating between Knox, in Clarion County, to Kane and then on to Mount Jewett, in McKean County.

The track and right of way was bought from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad when the B&O discontinued operations on the old Northern Subdivision between Foxburg and Kane. This line was a part of the old Pittsburgh and Western Railroad, originally a 3 foot (92 cm) narrow gauge line created in the latter third of the 19th century from a merging of various earlier narrow gauge lines.

When the segment of the B&O from Foxburg to Knox was taken out of service, shipping raw materials, mostly glassmaking sand, to Knox Glass became difficult. To ease this situation, a connection with the Conrail (originally the New York Central Railroad) line through Shippenville was put in place. The B&O and NYC crossed each other not too far west of Shippenville for many years, but there had never been provision for interchange between the two roads. Operations in to Knox, which had been the original southern terminus of the K&K, were discontinued around the time the only real customer in Knox, the Knox glass bottle company, ceased operations. This also pretty well ended use of the Shippenville interchange.

After the Knox segment was embargoed, the southern terminus became what was known as North Clarion Junction, where there was a fibreboard plant and a wye, the tail track of which had been the P&W's line across to the east side of the Clarion River to the borough of Clarion (county seat of Clarion County). This branch was discontinued at around the time the B&O purchased the P&W. The bridge over the Clarion River needed replacement and the railroad requested that the town help with funding the project. Clarion's town fathers declined this honor, so the railroad cut back service to the sest side of the river, and later terminated even this service.

At one time, the K&K derived some revenue from shipping out car loadings of coal from what had once been an extensive coal mining complex in and around the village of Lucinda, a few miles north of North Clarion Junction. During the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, under B&O ownership, coal loadings from this area were quite extensive. A conductor's report from one northbound freight train [Foxburg to Kane] in the early 1960s showed in excess of fifty loads of coal shipped north out of Lucinda, most of it bound for ports on the Great Lakes. The last coal shipper on the line, Zacheryl Coal, went bankrupt not too many years after the K&K acquired the line, which materially reduced shipping over the line, and thus reduced income.

The K&K also ran a tourist railroad operation over the segment of the line from Kane to Marienville (originally the site of another of the Knox Glass Bottle Company's plants), and back to Kane. A Tangshan Locomotive and Rolling Stock Works-built 2-8-2 steam locomotive was acquired to power the tourist trains, also the K&K has a 2-8-0 steam locomotive, a Baldwin Built. As the B&O never saw a need to turn locomotives at Marienville, there was no wye or turntable in that community. So the K&K built a wye there, specifically to turn its steam locomotive. There also is a four bay round house in Marienville, but it is in bad shape, with three of the four tracks having been removed.

As of the spring of 2006, the K&K ceased both freight and tourist service. One reason was that freight shipments over the line had declined seriously over the years. A second reason is that track condition on the line had deteriorated to the point that a large amount of money would be required to bring the track up to the point where it could safely be used. The owning company apparently either could not afford the cost of repairs or wanted a large amount of state and local governmental funding for the project and embargoed the line as a ploy to gain government assistance. Since the close in 2006 the Knox and Kane Railroad had only used their motive power 4 times. The last time was June 14 2007 moving the two steam locomotives to their Kane facility. Currently the railroad only has 2 steamers and one lone GP 9 and their ALCO RS-36 is ordered to be scrapped.

An additional reason the line was abandoned as a tourist operation was that the main attraction of the ride was a trip over the Kinzua Bridge. The viaduct was extensively damaged by a tornado in 2003. When the State of Pennsylvania, which owns the viaduct, could not afford to repair it, the railroad lost its major tourist draw.

In another devastating blow, on early Sunday March 16, 2008 the locomotives used to carry sightseers across the Kinzua Bridge were severly damaged by a fire set by arsonists..^[1] The fire, which burned the Biddle Street building used to house the trains in Kane, Pennsylvania caused $1 million in damage. The residents of Mount Jewett would watch the train several times daily as it passed through town--directly to the north of the borough building. This has further dampened the dream of rebuilding the bridge.

[edit] References

• "Running up the Stumps", The Sentinel, Spring, 2002, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Historical Society, Baltimore, MD.