Northern Tier (Pennsylvania)

The Northern Tier is a geographic region consisting of five rural counties in north-central Pennsylvania.

The five Northern Tier counties are home to roughly 180,000 people distributed among many small towns and the countryside.

[1] The largest town is Sayre which is located on the left-east bank of the North Branch Susquehanna River and is on Interstate 86 where it dips just south of the New York state line.

[1] Sayre Yard is a large railyard currently operated by Norfolk Southern Railroad that extends across the state line into Waverly, New York and connects rail transport centers via Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to freight yards in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Baltimore to Buffalo and other Upstate New York cities as well as the Great Lakes basin cities.

The Northern Tier region as a whole is notorious for its high unemployment and low per-capita incomes in comparison to the rest of Pennsylvania, though the discovery of the Marcellus Formation provided an economic boost in the 2000s and 2010s.