All aboard the Harmony Line
For twenty-three years the striking maroon-and-gold trolleys of the PHB&NC carried passengers and freight through the northern countryside to Pittsburgh, Butler and New Castle. Farmers sent cattle and crops to the city on it; country children rode it to high school; and it brought rural homes their first electricity.
The idea
Travel between Pittsburgh and the northern communities of Butler and New Castle was difficult in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Roads existed, but not the roads we take for granted: potholes and mud hampered horse and wagon, and most people had never seen a car, much less owned one.
Russel H. Boggs was a Pittsburgh entrepreneur and Evans City native who owned a department store in the city and spent much of his time traveling to Evans City, buying farm products from and selling store goods to rural families. Boggs and his business partner Henry Buhl used their friendly relations with their northern neighbors to secure a right-of-way for a trolley system: a dollar to each landowner, and a promise of a trolley stop on his property. Construction began at the Pittsburgh end in the fall of 1905.
By May 1908 the line ran from Pittsburgh to Evans City, and from Evans City to Butler, Ellwood City and New Castle. Operations officially began after a trial run from the Harmony car barn to Ellwood City on Sunday, July 2, 1908 — and the trolleys beat the Baltimore & Ohio passenger trains on time.
The trolleys
Most of the cars were built by the Niles Car and Manufacturing Company and shipped disassembled — twenty-five of them — to the Harmony car barn, where workers put them together and fitted steel wheels made at the Forged Steel Wheel Company of Butler. A typical car had a general seating area, a smoker section for gentlemen who preferred a cigar or pipe en route, and a baggage section, and carried about forty people.
Later the line added party cars, rented for $55 a day, on which church groups, students and small parties enjoyed movies and card-playing on their way to special occasions. Several work cars — including a street sprinkler — maintained the tracks.
The routes
The route map looks impossibly complicated: how could the trolleys keep decent time with so many stops? In fact not every entry was a real stop. Because the line cut through private land, Boggs had promised each landowner a personal "stop," and local trolleys did halt at the little sheds named Cupps, Smiley and Grimm — but only if someone was waiting. Express trolleys stopped only at the larger stations. At the Pittsburgh city limits the Harmony Line operators stepped aside and Pittsburgh Railways employees finished the trip, for a fare of ten cents a car.
The end of an era
The automobile did for the Harmony Line. April 22, 1931 was the last day of the Butler–Pittsburgh route; the rest ran through the summer at a loss. The last Harmony Line trolley rolled into the Harmony car barn at 4:48 a.m. on August 15, 1931.
In the years that followed all the tracks and buildings were torn down and sold for scrap, and the cars were ceremoniously burned. The Pennsylvania Power Company took over the routes to keep supplying electricity to rural customers. A few relics survive: a couple of refurbished stations, and a single car — the only one to escape destruction — at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, PA. The museum's own Harmony Line exhibit is part of the guided tour.
Text adapted from "The Harmony Line" © 2004 Jennifer Vasil, for the Harmony Museum.
TODO: the 16 period photographs on the old page (Evans City station, the Lyndora trestle, the route map, party car…) live on the old host — pull them into assets/ and place them here.