‘A priceless treasure of railroad archaeology’ is up and running in rural Pa.

ROCKHILL FURNACE, Pa. — When the coal was mostly mined out of the mountains here, and cars and trucks began to haul people and parcels more than trains, the East Broad Top’s steam whistle didn’t echo through the valleys quite as much.

Then, in 1956, the locomotives stopped altogether and were sent to slumber in a padlocked roundhouse. A cavernous, steam-powered shop across the yard, a wonderland where leather belts spun giant wheels and steel was pounded into shape like Vulcan’s ancient forge, also went dormant, its bright red doors padlocked, too.

The Kovalchick Salvage Co., of Indiana County, bought the whole property that year and stood to make a fortune selling it all as scrap. According to family lore, when founder Nick Kovalchick wandered around that dark roundhouse for the first time, though, he heard ghostly voices coming from those locomotives.

“Here comes the scrap man,” they said. “Here comes the butcher to tear us apart.”

And in that moment, the scrap man had a change of heart that never wavered.

“My father told them ‘As long as I’m alive, I’ll never put a torch to any of you.’ And he kept that promise for the rest of his life,” Joe Kovalchick said.

So the 150-year-old East Broad Top Railroad sat in limbo, coming to life for special occasions now and then, but mostly collecting dust and conjuring rumors for decades. The legend of that perfect and rare narrow-gauge rail yard, preserved in amber like some ancient fossil, stretched far beyond sleepy Huntingdon County.

“There’s no place like it in America,” said Dan Cupper, editor of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society’s newsletter. “It’s a priceless treasure of railroad archaeology.”

When the Kovalchicks sold the property to the nonprofit EBT Foundation in 2020, the padlocks finally came off for good. An army of volunteers and employees got their hands greasy, rebuilding tools no one makes today, and machines few humans have used in a half-century. Collectively, they brought steam and fire back to the rail yard and found history, literally, in every building on the property, even the small house that predated the trains.

“The earliest records we have of this farmhouse were from 1792,” said Brad Esposito, EBT Foundation’s general manager and a lifelong rail worker. “There were bins of rivets and bolts left behind and there was a Union officer that was wounded in the battle of Gettysburg who had a funeral wake here.”

Today, East Broad Top offers passenger rides on a variety of machines, including steam locomotives, a nearly 100-year-old gasoline motorcar “doodlebug” that is the only one left in the United States, and an assortment of trolleys. The rides begin at $16 for kids and there’s a wide variety of options, including a two-hour tour and discussion with EBT’s master mechanic for $40. The Smithsonian has called East Broad Top an “incomparable national treasure.” For the tiny towns of Rockhill Furnace and Orbisonia that are home to the East Broad Top — population 828, combined — the 40,000 people who visited last year and rode the short 4.5-mile track could be a treasure that multiplies over time.

“It has brought a lot of trade and new people coming into town. It’s getting us a little revenue to build a park,” said Linda Clark, mayor of Orbisonia. “The railroad is really bringing it all back to life.”

East Broad Top is such a beacon for train enthusiasts that Jonathan Smith left his home in Southwest Colorado, where he worked for the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, to become the EBT’s director of sales and marketing. He now lives in a town of about 350 in Huntingdon County and is dreaming of ways to get more tourists, not just train lovers, to come visit the East Broad Top.

Smith compares train people (he’s one of them) to Star Trek fans.

“They know every prop, every character, every scene,” he said on a sweltering day there last month. “But believe it or not, heritage railroads like ours, while rail fans are a portion of our business and we want them to be excited, 90% of our business is soccer moms. Everybody loves trains and dinosaurs as a kid, and some of us, myself included, never grow out of it.”

Huntingdon County is centrally located in the middle of the state, almost equidistant from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It’s about an hour south of State College and only about 30 miles from Pennsylvania’s largest lake — Raystown — which draws about 1 million visitors per year. Smith wants some of them to come to East Broad Top and says there are possible plans for a hotel nearby.

“Most of the people who go to Raystown Lake stay there but we’re doing our best to market to them,” he said.

Pennsylvania is chock-full of scenic train rides, in places like Jim Thorpe, with the Strasburg steam train in Lancaster County, and even in New Hope with its fall foliage rides.

“There’s more heritage railroads in Pennsylvania than anywhere else,” Smith said.

None of those trains can compare to what you’d see at East Broad Top, experts say.

“The shop area, the equipment you’ll see in there during a tour, that’s really what people have talked about most on the internet over the years. That’s really what sets it apart,” said Robert Holzweiss, president of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. “It’s a time capsule and it’s about the only place you’re gonna see something like that in America. It’s as if they turned off the lights, went home, and never came back.”

The EBT’s shop, where parts were made and repaired, is the real showstopper, a place where Smith and Esposito open the door, turn on the steam engines, and dozens of belts begin moving, seemingly everywhere from floor to ceiling. It’s like Willy Wonka opening the door to the chocolate room, except it’s filled with giant steam hammers and rare vices and cogs that weigh more than cars.

“I hate to use Jurassic Park as an example, but it’s like we’re bringing a dinosaur back to life,” Esposito said in the shop.

People stand in awe, once they’re inside, and it’s hard to get train enthusiasts to leave.

“Train folks, soccer moms, when they come in here, they’ve never seen anything like this,” Smith said. “They stand with their mouth open.”

It even happened to Sen. Bob Casey in 2022, when he scrapped his 45-minute time window and explored the rail yard and shop for a few hours. (Casey helped secure $500,000 in federal community project funding for EBT that will help build a fire-suppression system.)

Casey called East Broad Top “a hidden gem.”

The folks behind East Broad Top have major plans for expansion, too, to reclaim old tracks and make the train rides longer, benefiting other towns in the county. After leaving the shop, Smith got in a pickup and drove slowly away from Rockhill Furnace, pointing out bridges that would be repaired, and streets that would be torn up, all to let the locomotives travel farther.

Smith parked in a grassy lot, overgrown with trees in the sleepy town of Saltillo, about nine miles from the EBT station. If you looked hard enough, you could see two parallel lines in the grass.

“This town hasn’t seen a train since 1956 but we’re coming,” he said. “This is what is going to take us to the next level. This will make East Broad Top a must-see destination in Pennsylvania along the lines of the Liberty Bell.”

For Joe Kovalchick, whose father felt a kinship with those dormant locomotives nearly 70 years ago, the resurrection is about more than pride.

“It’s my heart here,” he said. “And it’s my dad’s heart and now it’s forever.”