Colebrookedale Railroad

Eastern Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill Valley was once the Silicon Valley of the iron industry. The corridor lit up in pre-revolutionary America thanks to its rich deposits of magnetic ore and generous rushing rivers. The Colebrookdale Railroad opened in 1869 to transport miners racing to the region in search of riches through what would be dubbed the “Secret Valley.”

The track was abandoned once steelworks and railroad use plummeted, but the county would purchase it in 2009. This opened the door for a local preservationist to reboot the railway as a new heritage line, which travels past the nation’s first blast furnace and refinery forge and alights in Pottstown (briefly known as “Boomtown USA”).

Furnaces no longer light up the valley, trip hammers have ceased pounding, and the entrepreneurs who made it all pulse have largely been forgotten. The resurrection of the railway line, however, successfully revived public awareness of the region’s significance. Since 2014, thousands of visitors have enjoyed the rumbling journey of the Secret Valley Line and the two detailed depots that mimic Pennsylvania’s nineteenth-century architecture.

The painstaking re-creation invites riders to venture back to the pioneer chic of the Industrial era, offering fine dining in immaculately restored cars, festooned with ferns evoking the untouched woodlands through which the line runs. These glamorous cars are heated for winter joyrides (for those frosty evenings when joy is found in surveying grist mills). Whether you’re in it for the Secret Valley or the Boomtown, a ride on the Colebrookdale transports you back to the lush, hardy time when this young country was steeling itself with excitement for all things locomotive.

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