The Harrisburg Area Greenbelt is one of the few rides in the Rails to Trails Association’s guide to Pennsylvania trails that didn’t start as a railroad bed. Nevertheless, the state’s history as a hub of railroading in the last century contributes to making Greenbelt rides, particularly along Front Street, interesting.
Riding south from Fort Hunter, you’ll pass through one of the 48 arches that make the Rockville Bridge, at 3,830 feet in length, the world’s largest stone arch railroad bridge. The bridge, which opened on Easter Day in 1902, is composed of 220,200 tons of stone, 2.5 times the weight of the Washington Monument. Two months after it opened, on June 15, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited made its maiden voyage from New York to Chicago. Today, the bridge carries mostly freight trains with Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian, which makes daily runs between New York and Pittsburgh, the only exception.
After passing Harrisburg’s Market Street bridge, you’ll pass under the Cumberland Valley Railroad Bridge which was built in 1846 and reinforced in the 1880s. It connects Harrisburg to City Island and the West Shore, but it is unused except for the temporary parking of Amtrak trains and recently, for a few years, for July 4 train excursions to view fireworks over the Susquehanna. It is currently owned by Capital Area Transit and there was talk of using it as part of a proposed light rail system which never came to fruition.
Just south of there is the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad bridge which today is used exclusively by the Norfolk Southern Railroad for freight. Its concrete piers encase the original stone masonry piers built in 1891. It has 51 piers, three more than the Rockville Bridge.
If you look across the river, you’ll see eight piers that were built to support the South Pennsylvania Railroad’s bridge across the Susquehanna. They were built in 1885, but Andrew Carnegie, one of the partners in the railroad with William H. Vanderbilt, backed out of the deal and construction was halted.
And here is an interesting bit of information for the environmentally conscious. When the Pennsylvania Power & Light Company was building the Safe Harbor Dam, the Pennsylvania Railroad was in the process of electrifying the line between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. PRR persuaded them to add two additional turbines to power their trains. Your travel on Amtrak between Harrisburg and Philadelphia doesn’t generate a single atom of carbon.
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An article by Bill Cologie
Along the Greenbelt is produced by the Capital Area Greenbelt Association (caga.org) in
cooperation with The Historical Society of Dauphin County (dauphincountyhistory.org).