I'm here at the Mon work with a big pile of stones behind me.

Since this is Pittsburgh, it shouldn't come as any surprise that this is actually an old bridge here.

In fact, there's a twin structure right across the river.

But then that begs the question.

Why isn't there a bridge here anymore?

What happened to it?

And what can these bridge piers tell us about a 20th century battle over who would control the freight in Pittsburgh?

I'm Dulce.

I'm here to explore and explain.

After the Civil War, the nation was rapidly industrializing.

And Pittsburgh was, of course, one of the biggest centers of steam and steel.

The greatest contributor to this industrial growth was the railroad.

Yes.

That existed and spread before the Civil War.

But in the 1860s and onward is when railroads really start to take off and come into their own.

A lot of mill capacity in Pittsburgh was put towards producing rails for the railroads, and these railroads would cross the continent.

And so as steel expanded, so did the railroad.

And as the railroads expanded, so did the need for steel, etc., etc.

by the turn of the century, the city was crossed by a multitude of railroad lines connecting us with cities like Philadelphia, Columbus, Detroit, Cleveland, Wheeling, Erie, Baltimore.

You had the Pennsylvania you had the B&O.

Oh, you had the P&LE all of their subsidiary lines and the local railroads like the Montour in the Union, all six river banks carried lines of their own.

Actually, the south bank of the Mon carried two lines.

It still carries two today.

Every hollow seemed to carry a railroad line.

Another railroad company would be hard pressed to find room to build another railroad into the city.

But back to those bridge peers.

In 1849, a streetcar company had been granted the right to build a bridge across the mine at Ferry Street, which is now called Stanwix Street.

They built two bridge piers and then I guess they ran out of money because that's all they built.

But this would be a boring video if that was the entire answer.

So let's go westward a note before we begin.

By the way, railroad history is often extremely confusing because a lot of railroads didn't last that long and there were many similar names between lines.

A lot of smaller railroads didn't have anything written down about them, and what was written down probably hasn't gone on the internet, which is where I do my research at.

And, so I've simplified as best that I can, and the smallest details don't matter a whole lot for this story anyway, so bear with me on that.

So where were we?

The Wabash Railroad has its beginnings in Illinois in 1837, but for our purposes, we only need to look at when Jay Gould gets involved with the railroad in the 1870s.

Jay Gould is one of the lesser known robber barons of the Gilded Age, but he's a baron nonetheless.

He's usually considered far worse than Carnegie or Rockefeller because he wasn't a philanthropist at all, and he didn't really create anything new.

His M.O.

was basically buy up railroads, turn a profit.

Do it again and again and then die.

And that is exactly what he did.

He really seemed to have a chip on his shoulder when it came to the rest of the northeast elite around this time, and because of this, he kind of became obsessed with linking his Midwest railroads to the East Coast.

And at the expense of those who already own the railroads.

They're one of the lines that he bought towards this end was the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, which was attempting to build a line from Wheeling to Sandusky.

But over six years they'd only laid 13.5 miles of track.

In 1880, Jay Gould buys this defunct railroad, and he keeps it in his back pocket as a way to connect his Wabash Railroad to his central of new Jersey by way of Massillon, Ohio, under his control.

They do finally complete the railroad from Sandusky to Wheeling to the year he died, 1892.

After his death, his sons take over his railroad empire, and they seek to avenge this mistreatment that he had apparently received at the hands of other railroads.

George Jay Gould, his eldest son, really takes the lead on this project to connect the Midwest railroads with the East Coast.

So to do this, George Jay Gould has three options.

He can either A go east from Minerva, Ohio to Butler, PA and then drop down to Pittsburgh.

B he can take control of the Pittsburgh little bit in Western and come through Beaver County.

Or C he can build a new railroad east from Wheeling.

Thankfully for us in this video he chooses the third option.

In 1900, Pittsburgh had the highest amount of freight tonnage being created of any city anywhere in the world.

The volume of freight leaving Pittsburgh was greater than Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City combined.

Most of this was being controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which transported over 80,000 tons of freight per day per mile on their lines into and out of the city.

The B&O and the P&LE also shipped a ton of freight, but the Pennsylvania Railroad really had a stranglehold on the city, and because of the bottleneck topography in the area, a lot of freight was being left on warehouse docks and not being shipped, at least not in a timely manner.

But when you're a monopoly, you don't really have to care about what your customers want or what they think of you.

Industry leaders were at the mercy of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the railroad didn't really want to split that pie with anybody else.

Can you imagine that a single company dominated industry?

Pittsburgh.

So completely who nobody really likes, but everybody's kind of forced to play ball with anyway.

In early 1901, George Jay Gould, Myron Herrick and some other industrialists pool around $20 million together for the purpose of building a railroad from somewhere.

near Wheeling to Pittsburgh.

This group was called the Toledo Syndicate, and it was the first major competition that Pennsylvania had faced in that market.

In a telegram to J.P.

Morgan, the president of the Pennsylvania man named Alex, Cassatt wrote, if this road is ever built, it will be a serious blow to all of our interests and no effort should be spared to stop its construction.

So in February of 1901, upon hearing Gould's plans for a new railroad into the city, Andrew Carnegie signed a deal to ship at least one quarter of his west bound freight with the new incoming Wabash Railroad.

But then, just 21 days later, he sold his steel company to J.P.

Morgan to form U.S.

steel.

This had actually been in the works for a few years at this point, but the timing does seem a little suspect given the players involved.

I personally think it's fair to assume that Morgan wielded a heavy hand behind the scenes, getting Carnegie to sell as soon as he could.

Morgan's idea behind forming U.S.

steel was to protect his interest in the Chicago steel industry, and having Carnegie kind of do his own thing was antithetical to that.

That goal of his.

But anyway, after a short price war, J.P.

Morgan was shipping steel with both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Union Railroad.

And he'd torn up that contract with the Wabash to thwart Gould Cassatt and the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased tons of Wheeling and Lake Erie stock, but they couldn't quite gain a controlling share.

Meyer and Herrick refused to sell any of his shares.

Turns out, by the way, that he would become governor of Ohio in 1904.

So this isn't just some run of the mill banker who won't budge around this time.

The Pittsburgh Coal Company also pledges their traffic to the new railroad in March of 1901.

Gould buys the rights to that streetcar charter from 1849, meaning he has the right of way to cross the Monongahela River.

Despite this, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the P&LE are in the city council almost daily, pleading the city not to let this new railroad be built.

Around this time, the Pennsylvania Railroad tells the Pittsburgh Coal Company, hey, we're not going to buy coal from you anymore unless you stop supporting Gould To which the Pittsburgh Coal Company responds.

I was just kidding about that.

Please don't hurt me.

In June of 1901, crews began building the new railroad east from a place called Pittsburgh Junction, Ohio.

It's a little north of Wheeling, but it does make more sense geographically to get to Pittsburgh in a straighter shot.

As the lines got closer to Pittsburgh, contracts were often awarded to out-of-town contractors who were cheaper.

Yes, but this really did not help Goulds reputation as an outsider who was just interested in turning a profit.

In August, crews tore down the existing bridge piers and put up the ones we still see today.

They're much larger than the original piers were, but that's because they had to account for much heavier traffic.

The city filed an injunction because they had not given the railroad permission to do that.

However, a local judge overturned this injunction, arguing as the railroad had argued, that they were just following the old streetcars charter.

Now, the Pennsylvania Railroad actually approaches Gould at this point and offers to buy this new line.

He asks for $27 million, which they balk at the PNC knew of Gould's plans to get to the East Coast and cut further into their market in the Philadelphia area, and they had hoped that partial ownership of the Norfolk and Western Railway in Virginia would strengthen their position, but simply to spite them.

Gould bought up every other piece of stock in that company, which brought it under his control.

Later, in June of 1901, the Pennsylvania tells Western Union, which is partially owned by Gould, that they will not renew their contract to use the railroad right of way for their telegraph lines.

The vice president of the Pennsylvania says, you know, we really shouldn't keep doing stuff like this.

We're just going to make him more popular because people are going to view him as the underdog.

So Gould and Cassatt has struck a deal.

Gould would sell the Norfolk and Western back to the Pennsylvania at fair market value.

If the Pennsylvania Railroad would stay out of his way in Pittsburgh, Cassatt that accepts this deal.

And as soon as it's finished, he reneged on it.

At the same time, the Wabash was lobbying Congress to allow them to lower their Mon River bridge.

All bridges over major rivers, by order of the War Department, had to be 75ft above the water.

However, the Pennsylvania Railroad lobbied Congress even harder, and the Wabash rescinded their fight.

At some point after this, however, the order must have been changed because those bridge piers are only about 45ft tall.

They're definitely not 75ft.

The Pittsburgh Dispatch reported around this time that freight service in and around Pittsburgh has utterly collapsed.

In 1902, Gould bought the Western Maryland Railroad from the city of Baltimore for $8.7 million, on the condition that Baltimore would be his East Coast terminus.

This completely blindsided the Pennsylvania.

He also purchased a Philadelphia area railroad, which he plans to connect to Baltimore in New York City.

The Pennsylvania had similar goals and only learned that Gould was purchasing it after the transaction was complete.

At this point, the Pittsburgh City Council still had not granted the ordinance needed to construct the long River bridge over a year after the request.

In the fall of 1902.

They told the Wabash, you're going to have to pay a small fee in order to get this ordinance, even though other railroads had gotten it for free.

The Wabash was desperate, and so they paid this illegal fine, but the city still didn't grant the ordinance.

In retaliation for the Western Maryland Purchase, the Pennsylvania follows through on its threat of canceling the Western Union contract.

It wasn't just the Pennsylvania.

The P&LE was also buying up land all around their railroad, so that the Wabash couldn't build parallel lines.

There's this meeting in 1902 where Gould pulls Henry Clay Frick aside, and he asks him to arrange a piece between him and the Pennsylvania.

Frick says that the Pennsylvania has no problem with the Wabash entering Pittsburgh, only with their plans for an East Coast seaport.

I think the evidence kind of says otherwise.

Also in early 1903, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed that lower court's decision on the legality of the bridge piers, which reinstated the city's injunction against the railroad.

After all of this very transparent, corruption and protectionism, and with the freight system of the city ground to a halt, the citizens were largely behind Gould by this point in time.

Despite his earlier unpopularity and generally poor reputation, this is exactly what the vice president of the PNC had feared would happen.

And by the way, J.P.

Morgan, who is generally on the side of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had this to say about the telegraph lines getting torn down amid an upcoming election and rumors of bribery, the city council finally granted the railroad the ordinance that they had hoped for in February of 1903, and in typical politician fashion, most of them had bought Wabash stock leading up to the vote.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Railroad stock fell due to the telegraph pole removal.

Also that month, the West Side Belt Railroad had been completed from banks will declare it in via Castle Shannon.

So now that they had permission, construction really sped up to complete one of the most marvelous railroads at the time.

Over the 60 miles from Pittsburgh Junction to Pittsburgh itself, the railroad contained 88 bridges, not counting the two massive spans over the Ohio and the Monongahela.

The longest of these bridges was 800ft.

The highest was 130.

There were 50 earthen fills totaling over 1,000,000yd of earth, most of that coming from the 20 tunnels that the rail line passed through.

Cement years totaled 150,000 barrels, and amazingly, there was no grade crossings and no intersections with other lines along the entire route.

All of that for $24 million.

Now that's a bargain.

Actually it wasn't.

It was terribly expensive.

That's $1 billion in today's money.

So the new railroad was going to have to do really well for itself if it wanted to recoup those costs.

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which the construction crews slept in a tent city located at the Rock yard, which is between the Greentree Tunnel and the Whiskey Run Viaduct.

You can see this when you're driving out toward Robinson on 376.

There is an additional tunnel located near Junius Street, but during the construction of the line, an ember from one of the trains lit the wooden bracing on fire, and it was decided to just daylight the tunnel instead of turning it into a cut.

The line was advanced for its time.

The maximum grade was only 7/10 of a percent, and the maximum curvature was only five degrees.

Now the steepest and curvy parts were all east of Greentree, making the final descent into the city the most harrowing part of the journey.

As the lead engineer had once told a reporter, The Wabash will go its own way.

A local newspaper had this to say at the time, which I find kind of hilarious because it's so dramatic, and also because if you gave me five guesses as to the color of the Monongahela, none of them would be blue.

There was sadly one major accident during construction of the bridge across the Mon in October of 1903, a crane hauling up a steel beam to the north section of the bridge suddenly collapsed, bringing a section of the bridge with it.

Seven men fell to their deaths and three were crushed in the barge below.

As the bridge rose across the river, blocks of buildings were being leveled for the construction of the palace depot, as it was known.

They're not enormous by train station standards.

It appeared much larger in the context of the Golden Triangle, where everything is kind of condensed.

There was a glass roofed train shed with six tracks, each 500ft long.

The train shed sat 35ft above second, third and fourth avenues on the corner of Ferry and Liberty.

There was a ten storey head house and a neo baroque style.

It had walls made of marble, a stained glass concourse, a 4000 square foot waiting room perched over Fourth Avenue.

Office space for the new railroad, and a large clock and dome decorating the tower.

There's also a four story freight house with tracks that ran elevated over Liberty and Penn, heading towards the Allegheny, which was anticipating a future northward expansion.

During construction, century old coins and Native American artifacts were uncovered.

The station was the largest Beaux art building in all of Pittsburgh, and considered one of the prettiest train stations in the whole country.

Now, Gould could sit in his office looking north down Liberty Avenue towards his enemies at Pennsylvania Station.

He had finally made it.

The Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railroad was here, and Gould had control of rails from the Rocky Mountains to the forks of the Ohio.

On June 1st, 1904, the station and the bridge had their grand opening ceremony.

People crowded downtown Mount Washington on the waterfront to get a look at this new structure that would save their city from the grip of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

And by the way, the station signage wrote Pittsburgh with an H. Unlike the Pennsylvania Railroad station across town.

So like ten points to Gould for that one.

The first train left a month later and route to the Saint Louis World's Fair.

The Wabash announced that they would have lower prices than any other freight carrier in the city.

And then all of the other carriers immediately dropped their rates to match.

But for all this fanfare, the second train to leave on July 3rd, 1904 only had one passenger.

Now, why this line was so unpopular with passengers?

I can't really say, and nothing that I've read really points to a reason either.

Probably because the established railroads had more established and reliable routes.

But for freight, the answer is almost certainly corruption at the hands of the Pennsylvania Railroad and civic leaders.

But there are a few other things to note.

First off, the established railroads could actually afford to drop their rates, and the Wabash really couldn't.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in the world at this time, so it really had nothing but time and capital to throw at defeating the Wabash.

Second, the Brilliant Branch opened up in October of 1904.

It was supposed to open in April, but due to landslides it would got pushed back six months.

And what this cutoff does is allow freight trains to jump from East Liberty to the North Shore, bypassing all of that congestion at the rail yard and in the Golden Triangle.

So this took a lot of pressure off of the bottleneck at Pennsylvania Station, and made it easier for shippers to stick with the Pennsylvania Railroad.

There was, however, some good news for the Wabash.

Later in 1904, the West Side Belt Railway and the Wheeling in Lake Erie merged with the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal, and a permanent connection was established at West Bell Junction.

This was a boon to the Wabash, because now they could rely on coal, steel and iron ore shipments.

There were six trains each day headed to Wheeling, two trains a day to Saint Louis.

They were called the Hot Shot Varnish.

And there's two trains.

to Toledo called the Pittsburgh Limited.

The railroad picked up more freight from a deal with the Saint Clair Terminal Railroad, which lessened its reliance on coal.

The Western Maryland Railroad was rapidly building towards the Chesapeake Bay.

But despite all this growth, the railroad never really bought its own rolling stock, choosing instead to just rent from the Wheeling in Lake Erie.

The railroad had been crippled from birth, and it wasn't long for this world.

So over the years, various promises were made and broken between people and industry and the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal.

The Wabash itself, the parent company, if you will, fell on hard times.

The Western Maryland ran out of money before it could reach the coast.

In October of 1907, a financial crisis began on Wall Street, and the Wabash, like many other companies across the country, was unable to fulfill its debts.

This meant that Gould's empire, like a house of cards, just fell apart.

In May of 1908, the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railroad went insolvent.

Only four years after opening, it was no more.

And then, after going through five separate Receiverships, the Wabash Pittsburgh terminal reemerged as the Pittsburgh and West Virginia in 1916.

This time with no Gould ownershi whatsoever.

In fact, Gould never reached his dream of expanding his railroad transcontinental.

He reached the Rocky Mountains to the forks of the Ohio, but he could never complete that gap between Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

Nor could he complete that gap between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific.

So then what happened to the bridge?

What about the station?

Well, passenger traffic ceased in 1931, and then for 15 more years, two freight trains a day ran across the bridge.

But in March of 1946, the worst fire in a century in Pittsburgh began in the freight shed of the station, causing millions of dollars worth of damage.

The station and terminal line were officially abandoned in August of 1947 as a result of that fire, and the last train crossed the bridge in February of 1948, hauling burnt steel from the station fire.

A month later, American Bridge Company began dismantling the bridge, literally using their own construction plans, but just going in reverse.

It took them about five months to complete the job, and they recycled the steel by using it to build the Mansfield Bridge in Johannesburg.

Steel from the southern portion of the bridge was hauled away by Pennsylvania Railroad hopper cars on the tracks below.

It seemed for a long time that the Pennsylvania would have the last laugh.

The station was stranded in the triangle.

The Pittsburgh in West Virginia was headquartered there, and a roller rink had opened up in the old waiting room.

But in 1951, the railroad moved their offices to the brand new Gateway Center Number one across the street.

And from 1953 to 1954, the station was demolished.

The rubble was dumped on and around Neville Island.

Just a few days after its 50th birthday.

The station was gone.

I'm here at the Beechview Seldom Seen Greenway, which is one of the best places in the city to see what remains of the Wabash infrastructure.

So walk with me through this tunnel here.

I'll.

I'll show you what's around the other side.

What we're looking at here is the, I guess, to be the easternmost arch bridge on the Pittsburgh Terminal Railway.

And I don't know if they all looked as cool as this one does, but this is probably one of my favorite bridge slash tunnels in Pittsburgh, just because it has brickwork on the inside.

I think this is really just something else really astounding.

It crosses over what at the time was probably a dirt road, as well as, sawmill run down here.

Or maybe this is little sawmill.

running.

Not entirely sure.

There's a salt dome on, route 19 and route 51 over there.

It's a beautiful day.

I couldn't miss this opportunity to come out here and, show you guys what it's all about.

It's a little bright, so I gotta keep adjusting my camera here.

Now, what we're looking at up here above, there's two railroad bridges that cross, and it might be a little confusing at first, but that upper bridge was the, the west side beltline.

Okay, I just made a mistake there.

I had to double check my little map that I've drawn myself to, to make sure I was not spreading misinformation about the, Wabash Railroad here.

But of these two bridges, there's a lower one, and there is an upper one.

The upper one would have been, a siding track, so to speak, for, basically the modern equivalent of a, a ramp on the freeway connecting the mainline to this kind of secondary west Bell line.

While this lower line would have been to the West Beltline itself.

And of course, it wouldn't be as exploring without me getting up there and showing you guys.

And it gets even cooler once you do get up there, but I like this shot as well.

All righty.

I'm up here at the top now at what was once West Side Junction or West Belt Junction.

Right now it's just basically a curve in the track.

And that's because in 1962, the line, east of Brook yard was single tracked to show us what we have now.

You can tell the rock cut's wide enough for two tracks.

They only have one running down the center.

And, I can't flip the camera around, I guess.

Can I?

Behind me, it's it's hard to tell.

I'll walk over there and get some front facing footage, but basically, the main line would have curved that way and then back across, what's now Sawmill Run Boulevard through the Wabash Tunnel.

And, let me turn the camera around here and show you what that.

So the recently just cleared the forest here.

I was here a few months ago, and this was totally overgrown.

I don't know exactly what their plans are, but this is the exact right of way that the, the Pittsburgh Terminal railroad tracks would have gone on towards the Wabash Tunnel.

Then over this way, we have the West Side Belt Railroad down below, which is no longer that those tracks have been torn up.

I don't know exactly when.

And then this upper line here would have been the one that connected the two, and there would have been another line in the place where that warehouse is now.

So I'm going to go down the tracks towards, Green Tree.

I've got a special little, something in store for you.

So I'll see you down there.

While we're walking back here, you can, see, I don't know how well this is showing up on camera, but there is the remains of the cross over there where the, the flyover where the Pittsburgh Terminal railroad tracks would have crossed over the west side belt tracks.

It's kind of just buried now, for some reason, Norfolk Southern has put a huge pile of dirt here.

I don't even know where that came from, but you can really see the cut and all the old railroad ties down there.

For when they tore up this line a little over a decade ago.

I also wanted to talk about while I'm here, I think this is, an interesting bit of the history that I found while I was researching for this video that, the Pittsburgh and West Virginia, which, of course, is what this became after the, Wabash went under.

It included the West Side belt, but not the W&LE at that time.

And it became part of what was called the alphabet route in 1931.

This was sort of a re ignition of the Gould Stream for a new generation.

The alphabet route was a consortium of regional carriers which banded together to challenge the dominance of the Big four railroads.

They were the NYC and STL aka the NKP, the W&LE, the P&WV, the WM, the RDG, the C&J, the L&HR, and the NYNH & H. Simple enough right?

All right.

Now we're on the west side belt lines bridge over Little Sawmill Run which now also crosses the, the parkway west through 76.

And actually this bridge was reconstructed in 1956 to accommodate construction because it had been I believe, a wooden trestle previous to that.

Up here you have the main Wabash Pittsburg Terminal bridge, which is now used by the Wheeling in Lake Erie.

This branch that I'm on now was abandoned in 2011 because up until that point in time, it's still connected down to the power lines in the P&LE lines.

But when they redid the whole West End circle, disaster in 2011, they had to get rid of a viaduct down there.

And I guess there wasn't enough freight traffic for the railroad to really want to fight that.

So this has been, abandoned now for 13 years.

So these lines were, sold to Norfolk and Southern, I'm sorry, Norfolk and Western.

In 1962, which then became Norfolk Southern in 1982.

Which means that that bridge hasn't been painted in about 40 years, because it still says it was open last year on it.

I love that little detail.

Once I learned that these lines, both the one I'm on and the one behind me, were sold to the Wheeling and Lake area in 1990, and it wasn't the same Wheeling in Lake Erie exactly that Jay Gould had bought in 1880.

But I do kind of like the continuation that he ended up winning in the end, because the wheeling Lake Erie is still around, trains still travel on this line, I think four times a day.

And, what happened to the competition that the Goulds were fighting against the PRR, the P&LE, the NYC, the B&O?

They're dead and gone.

They've been gone for 40 years.

So, one point to George Gould for that one.

Now, I know this video is getting long, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Wabash Tunnel.

Some of you who are definitely familiar with the system are probably yelling at me.

The whole time you're watching this, waiting until I mention it.

I saved the best for last, trust me.

So, as I said, the last, train would have gone through this tunnel in 1948, leaving the city in 1933, after passenger service was discontinued, the city did a feasibility study to see if it would be a good candidate for vehicle traffic.

But because there was no ventilation system installed despite its length, they elected not to do that.

So then it sat from 1848 to 1970.

Over 20 years.

It just sat abandoned.

In 1970, the Port Authority bought the tunnel, and they revamped it to put in a people mover system that Westinghouse was developing.

That ended up not happening.

It's at for another 20 years.

Then in 1995, they revamped it again for a bus way to the airport, which also ended up not happening.

But finally in 2004, something did happen and they revamped it for an HOV bypass to the Fort Pitt Tunnel.

Now it was estimated at 4500 cars a day would travel through this tunnel.

Currently, I believe the numbers are about 150 cars a day.

Leave a comment down below if you've ever actually driven through this tunnel, because I don't know anyone who has.

Well, that's all I've got for you when it comes to the Wabash Pittsburg Terminal Railway.

If you liked the video, consider subscribing to the channel.

Liking this video, leaving a comment down below.

All that good stuff.

If you'd like to learn more about this subject, I've got all my links in the description down below.

There's a lot of good information stuff I couldn't even include in this video.

It's already long enough.

And thank you so much for watching.

It really means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.