The historic East Broad Top Railroad, a narrow-gauge former coal carrier on its second revival as a heritage line, reached a symbolic milestone Aug. 8 when a train steamed into a rural Pennsylvania village for the first time in 69 years.
Drawn by 1916 Baldwin Locomotive Works 2-8-2 Mikado engine No. 16, the five-car special arrived at the trackside Southern Huntingdon County High School campus after a 2½-mile run from EBT’s headquarters at Rockhill Furnace, Pa.
Among the more than 100 passengers were board members and staff of the nonprofit EBT Foundation, which owns the railroad; Friends of the East Broad Top volunteers; school board members, administrators, and alumni; and members of the EBT Corridor Committee, a 15-member coalition of local officials and groups whose aim is to foster community growth as the railroad rebounds.
The significance of the event is that this is the farthest extent of EBT’s campaign to reopen its southern main line to the Broad Top Mountain semi-bituminous coal mining region that once gave it its reason to exist. The near-term goal is the town of Saltillo, six more miles, within the next few years. The Friends volunteers have already funded the rebuilding of the razed station there.
A longer strategy is to reopen an additional 11 miles—the road’s entire southern main line—with its 2% grades, two tunnels and horseshoe curve, to the former coal towns of Robertsdale and Woodvale. There, Friends volunteers already have restored the depot, staff a museum and offer walking tours with interpretation of the mine ruins.
A second reason for the celebration is the return of No. 16, which was restored to operation in 2023 and ran flawlessly that season, but was sidelined intermittently in 2024 and 2025 for maintenance and inspections. Work included partial or complete replacement of leading and trailing trucks and running gear, including driving boxes, brasses, hub liners, axles, and crank pins, according to Master Mechanic Dave Domitrovich. Hidden old imperfections in material surfaced during the first season, requiring remediation that wasn’t obvious during the initial restoration.
The 82-ton engine resumed pulling regularly scheduled public trains north to Colgate Grove—a 4½-mile run—earlier the same day as it pulled the southbound inaugural special to Pogue. In peak season, EBT typically runs five days a week on that part of the line, but has announced that it will offer occasional public trips on the newly reopened stretch south.
The main line extension illustrates what Henry Posner III, one of the incorporators of the EBT Foundation, means when he says, “Every time you come to the EBT, there’s something new—it’s always evolving.”
EBT Roots
Completed in 1874, the EBT main line extended for 33 miles, with several branches added over the years. Its purpose was to haul coal to the Pennsylvania Railroad main line junction at Mount Union, Pa. It attracted the interest of historians as far back as 1936, when a group chartered an all-day photo special over the entire line. EBT turned out to be the longest-lived of Pennsylvania’s many three-foot-gauge railroads, closing as a common carrier in the spring of 1956.
Scrap dealer Nick Kovalchick of Indiana, Pa., bought the line that year but resisted abandoning it, keeping the property intact and reviving a short 4½-mile stretch in 1960 for seasonal steam-powered tourist rides. The federal government’s Department of the Interior quickly designated it a National Historic Landmark.
The line continued to operate that way, as a subsidiary of a for-profit company, until economics prompted Kovalchick’s son Joe to close it at the end of 2011. With six Baldwin steam locomotives (all original-to-EBT 2-8-2 types built between 1911 and 1920), a small passenger car fleet, and a historic station, office and shops, it remained dormant for eight years while the younger Kovalchick sought a viable path for preservation to honor his father’s foresight.
In February 2020, a newly formed nonprofit group, the EBT Foundation, Inc., took ownership with a goal of full restoration as an icon of the American industrial age. EBTF was founded by industry leaders Wick Moorman, retired Chairman, President and CEO of Norfolk Southern Corp.; business executive Bennett Levin of Washington Crossing, Pa.; and Posner, who is chairman of Railroad Development Corp., with global railroad interests, including the Iowa Interstate Railroad.
In the five years since, the Foundation and its partner, the 2,200-member Friends, have restored historic shop buildings, rolling stock and track. Moreover, they have jointly funded a robust project to document and organize the railroad’s corporate, engineering and operating archives under the direction of archivist Julie Rockwell.
As for the public face, tourist rides behind a small General Electric center-cab diesel began in 2021. Those same visitors also could now tour the circa-1900 machine shop, a mechanical keepsake captured in time with its spinning overhead lineshafts, pulleys and belt-driven machinery, including wheel and axle lathes, drill presses, a boring machine and blacksmith shop implements. Board member and retired Strasburg Rail Road President and CMO Linn Moedinger has said the shop is “all the way it was in 1950, and a lot of it is the way it was in 1910.” Previously offered as a separate-ticket item, docent-guided tours through the shops are now included with every train ride fare.
The first EBT track to be rehabilitated was the 4½-mile tourist-era (1960-2011) segment of main line, terminating at a picnic grove with a wye for turning trains. Steam engine No. 16 returned to service in 2023, and the Foundation intends to begin restoring a second engine soon—No. 15 (Baldwin, 1914).
An unsung partner is the volunteer-staffed Rockhill Trolley Museum, which offers rides on a two-mile electrified standard-gauge line laid on a portion of EBT’s former Shade Gap Branch. There’s a good bit of cross-pollination of labor and skills, with many of the trolley museum members doubling on either the Foundation staff or Friends volunteer work. The railroad and the museum loan each other tools and equipment, and cooperate with joint ticketing and coordinated schedules.
The Friends’ Role
Management and admirers both knew that the mountainous territory to the south offered more scenic vistas and a connection to the area’s coal mining culture and economy, so EBT and the Friends began working to restore the main line, reclaiming it from encroaching trees, brush, washouts and, in places, standing water. The Foundation’s two full-time track employees work hand-in-hand with volunteer parties supplied by the Friends, ranging in size from a handful to nearly two dozen at a work session.
One of the cornerstones of the rebirth is the Friends’ uncanny fundraising ability. Tapping into latent enthusiasm for the railroad, the group conducts annual campaigns and announced in June 2024 that it had raised $1 million since the Foundation acquired the line in 2020. Each year, the group sets a campaign goal, and each year, donors far exceed the mark. For 2025, the goal is $270,000 but the fund already has raised $488,505, with a month to go till the next campaign begins.
Friends President Andy Van Scyoc said every dollar raised over the $270,000 mark goes to buy additional track and roadbed material to accelerate the main line restoration, which has been dubbed the “March to Saltillo.” The town, as noted, is the near-term target and the location of the Friends’ station re-creation project. A few hundred feet from the depot, the Friends plan to rebuild an EBT water tank that burned in 1987.
The Friends membership has nearly tripled, rising from about 800 in 2020 to 2,200 today, rivaling the membership sizes of the two nationwide rail history groups, the National Railway Historical Society and the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.
EBT Foundation track foreman Henry Long said the rebuilding process involved dismantling 85-pound main line stick rail and reassembling it with fresh bolts, spikes, and tie plates, and new or relay treated ties, followed by ballasting, tamping, and surfacing. This brings a new look and a new resiliency to the roadbed. The common-carrier EBT, by contrast, used material that was cheap and available—untreated ties, and ballast consisting of moisture-wicking cinders and furnace slag byproduct. For sections through grade crossings, Long said, the railroad upgraded the track structure to 100-pound rail.
Gene Tucker, trackwork coordinator for the Friends, said the level of dedication, interest, and expertise among volunteers is surging, noting that 20 members showed up for the July 21 workday. “There’s pent-up interest,” he said. “They want to see this happen.”
The Foundation raises funds on its own, too. In addition to receiving financial gifts of varying amounts, the group has won state, federal, and private grants, including a $1.6 million state grant to rehabilitate two bridges, including the road’s largest span, the 268-foot-long steel Pogue Bridge, which is the next big project in line.
One of the three railroad-industry partners who organized the Foundation, Bennett Levin of Washington Crossing, has made the observation that “Without the Friends, there would be no East Broad Top. The Foundation is riding on the back of the Friends. The Friends kept it alive [by continuing to work and paint during the eight-year hiatus 2011-2020] and invested an enormous amount of volunteer labor.”
Casual But Prophetic Remark
Levin tells a story about an ironic episode in his life connected to EBT: In 1960, the year the EBT came back as a tourist railroad the first time, he was a senior engineering undergraduate at Penn State University, 40 miles away. He borrowed a car and drove to see the steam trains running. Decades later, he was returning from a trip to Maryland and happened to take the backwoods way, Pennsylvania Route 994, which, in places, parallels the section of weed-grown main line abandoned since 1956. He remarked to his wife that he had a “vision of trains going on those abandoned tracks—what a wonderful thing that would be … passing the high school and the kids seeing [living history].”
But he dismissed the notion—“I had no interest in the EBT and never thought it would be back”—little suspecting that years later, he would play a key role in its 2020 revival. Levin believes that full restoration “will change the character of the place.” The synergy among EBT and other regional sites such as the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad in Cumberland, Md., and the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona, Pa., will spark a transition. “It will not just be a tourist railroad,” he said, “it will be an international attraction.”
At the event, General Manager Brad Esposito said, “it was cool to have everyone here” who holds a stake in the project—school officials, EBT employees and volunteers, and the EBT Corridor committee. Glancing a few dozen yards south at the bare steel skeleton of the Pogue Bridge awaiting its turn at restoration next, he said, “That will be pretty cool, too.”
The 15-member corridor group wants to preserve history, encourage tourism, promote entrepreneurship, and retain the small-town culture of the communities along the line. Committee Chairman Alan Miller noted that “Our towns have been spiraling down. I see this progress as changing the direction of that spiral.”
