East Broad Top Railroad

Chartered in 1856 and opened for service in the 1870s, the three-foot-gauge East Broad Top was built to serve the coal and iron industries of the Broad Top region, linking the mines and furnaces around Rockhill Furnace with the Pennsylvania Railroad at Mount Union.  What survives today is far more than a collection of historic locomotives. At Rockhill Furnace, much of the EBT’s original railroad complex remains together: the roundhouse, turntable, blacksmith shop, foundry, car shop and remarkably intact belt-driven machine shop, along with original locomotives, freight and passenger equipment and portions of the railroad’s historic main line.  The railroad’s Baldwin-built 2-8-2 Mikados are among its best-known survivors. Steam locomotive No. 16 returned to service in 2023 following an extensive restoration, bringing EBT steam back to the railroad for the first time in more than a decade. Restoration of additional historic equipment and infrastructure continues throughout the property.  Perhaps most remarkable is the shop complex. Rather than being recreated as a museum exhibit, it survives as the railroad left it, with an extensive collection of historic machine tools still driven through the overhead line-shaft and belt system. Those shops continue to play a role in maintaining and restoring EBT equipment today.  The East Broad Top is a National Historic Landmark, but it is also an active railroad again. Excursion trains operate from the historic Orbisonia Station at Rockhill Furnace, while restoration continues south along the former main line. Visitors can also take guided tours into the railroad’s normally inaccessible shop complex and see firsthand the machinery, buildings, and equipment that make the EBT such an extraordinary survivor.  For railroad enthusiasts, the significance of the East Broad Top is difficult to overstate. It isn’t a modern tourist railroad assembled from equipment gathered from different places. It is the railroad itself—its locomotives, shops, machinery, rolling stock, right-of-way, and industrial landscape surviving together more than 150 years after operations began.