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Be an outsider. In the heart of Pennsylvania's cold country, trains had their heyday.

As freight transportation matured beyond the canals of the early industrial days, railroads became the predominant means of moving goods, including anthracite coal, from the region.

Before the glamour days of the Orient Express, the Alaska Railroad, and myriad other luxury rail travel

options. Train travel revolutionized the way necessities and people got from here

to there. I'm Jay Sneperson and this is the

America's National Parks podcast. Scranton's Steamtown National Historic Site

captures the history of steam railroad

transportation from physical train specimens to the science of steam

locomotion to the sensory and visceral effects that captivate the imagination to the stories of the people who made train travel possible.

The exhibits are not limited to the Pennsylvania region, but there's a unique aspect of steam railroad history embodied in this area known for its rich deposits of anthracite coal.

And so we begin to explore Steam Railroad history and the very place that Steam town is set with a story replete with time and place and a beautiful woman.

The time, the turn of the 20th century, the place the Lackawanna Valley.

The woman, a young socialite named Phoebe Snow, whose surname Snow conjures up the exact opposite of the black dirt of the steam railroad.

In 1882, the Delaware Lackawanna and Western Railroad, known for short as the

Lackawanna Railroad, completed its track into Buffalo, New York, running diagonally across Pennsylvania.

At the time, it became the shortest route from New York City, where a ferry connected the city to the Hudson River Waterfront Railroad Terminus in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Buffalo,

the entryway to Niagara Falls in Canada.

In fact, the Buffalo Railroad Terminal set right on the shores of Lake Erie, providing New York

...