Bellefonte Central Railroad

The purpose of this line was to connect Bellefonte with Pennsylvania State College, and to tap the iron ore deposits along Buffalo Run.

Experienced contractors, they were working at the time on the Beech Creek Railroad,[2] and began grading the Bellefonte & Buffalo Run in March 1883.

This grade followed Buffalo Run from Bellefonte to Waddle, where a horseshoe curve carried it across and out of the valley and it climbed eastward to the summit at Alto.

[4][8] The new railroad was organized under the presidency of Robert Frazer, a precocious civil engineer formerly employed by the Lehigh Valley Coal Company.

Frazer's first goal was to reduce dependence on ore traffic by extending the railroad from a wye at Struble to State College.

They came to terms in July 1892, and Reilly began making arrangements to restart ore mining and put the furnace back in blast.

[16] At the end of April, Tom Shoemaker resigned as superintendent to tend to his expanding duties supervising Bellefonte Furnace and ore mining at Graysdale.

While Pine Grove Mills would originate some traffic through farming and logging, the extension was primarily contemplated as part of a larger route.

The Pennsylvania Railroad already occupied the only usable gap at Spruce Creek and would not look favorably on its new competitor for the Broad Top traffic.

[19] After a little grading, the project stalled until 1896, when the railroad lifted the rail from the derelict Red Bank Branch west of Graysdale and used it to lay track on the extension.

Penn State University had begun to represent an important source of freight and passenger traffic, although the railroad frequently clashed with the school over unpaid bills.

[23] In 1896, Professor John Price Jackson obtained permission from the railroad to run trolley wire over its tracks from State College to Struble.

Their last contribution to the railroad's prosperity was the huge heaps of slag accumulated at the furnace sites: this was shipped over the Bellefonte Central to the PRR for use in construction projects.

[25] Furthermore, high calcium limestone deposits in Bald Eagle Mountain, on the north side of the Buffalo Run valley, were now being exploited, much of their production going to steel mills in Pittsburgh.

These quarries, eventually consolidated under the management of the Chemical Lime Company, would replace the iron furnaces as the principal generators of traffic on the Bellefonte Central.

The object of the purchase was to send freight directly to the PRR main line at Tyrone, bypassing the circuitous route via Bellefonte.

[2] Frustrated in its expansion attempt, the Bellefonte Central was sustained throughout the Great Depression by the shipment of construction material to State College.

Penn State extensively expanded its campus in the late 1920s and 1930s, in part to keep up with increased enrollment during the Depression, and many supplies traveled over the railroad.

A new station was built on North Atherton Street in State College in 1930, and the line was cut back to the power plant.

While it was bought out by National Gypsum Company at the end of 1940, the modernization (paid for by a Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan) would keep the lime operation competitive for decades, and make it the largest shipper on the Bellefonte Central.

The ore was initially trucked to Waddle for shipment, but after it was determined to be insufficiently pure, the company obtained Reconstruction Finance Corp. money for further improvements.

[2] While regular passenger service ended in 1946,[26] post-war traffic remained strong, again largely on the basis of Penn State construction.

The Bellefonte Central also carried construction materials for the building of local homes, as enrollment at Penn State increased under the GI Bill.

Although the advent of trucking was steadily eating into the less-than-carload freight business, the railroad still handled bulk deliveries of food to Penn State and shipments of machinery, automobiles, and paper.

[26] After years of attempting to generate new traffic in State College, the Bellefonte Central finally gave up on the southern end of its line in 1974.

The Chemical plant was sold in April 1983 to Confer Trucking, a local firm, which operated it at reduced capacity and had no need for rail service.