The Lewisburg, Centre and Spruce Creek Railroad was chartered on April 1, 1853, to run westward from the vicinity of Lewisburg, on the west bank of the West Branch Susquehanna River, through the southern valleys of Centre County, Pennsylvania to Spruce Creek, on the main line of the PRR.
Its charter was amended on March 3, 1854, allowing it to reach the PRR at Tyrone, a town more industrially developed than Spruce Creek.
The company continued grading west towards Laurelton[2] and did some work on the line east of Tyrone, but the Panic of 1873 slowed construction again.
Ambling up the broad valley between Bald Eagle Mountain and Tussey Mountain, it turned southeast at Marengo to pierce Gatesburg Ridge by the gap of Halfmoon Creek, which it followed to Spruce Creek below Pennsylvania Furnace.
Running north along Spruce Creek and then the Beaver Branch, it ended in a station near Fairbrook by 1881, 19.9 miles (32.0 km) in all.
In 1882, another short line of 2.03 miles (3.27 km), the Juniata Branch, was built off of the Scotia Branch just north of Gatesburg Ridge to reach ore pits of the Juniata Mining Company west of Scotia.
[5] The PRR began to extend the Lewisburg and Tyrone again in 1884, laying rail west from Spring Mills along Sinking Creek and then out across Penns Valley to Centre Hall and Oak Hall, from which the new line followed Spring Creek to Lemont.
The Bellefonte Central Railroad received permission to take over the Fairbrook Branch, building down from State College along the likely route of the unbuilt middle division of the L&T, but the PRR's manipulation of rate divisions ensured that the Bellefonte Central could not operate the branch except at a loss.
It was embargoed in 1933, and rail was removed in 1941–1942, after a long series of unsuccessful legal proceedings by the Bellefonte Central.
In 1970, Penn Central abandoned the middle of the Bellefonte Branch from Mifflinburg to Coburn, a section by then bereft of traffic potential.