Welcome to Victorian Bellefonte!
The Bellefonte Train Station Story
By Mike Bezilla
Visit the Bellefonte Train Station and you’ll quickly see why so many local residents take pride in this handsome structure. But there was a time when the town’s station was a flat-out embarrassment.
The first depot on the site dated from 1864 and served trains from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly constructed Bald Eagle Valley line that ran between Tyrone and Lock Haven. Twenty years later, when the PRR was building a 67-mile branch from Lewisburg that would enter Bellefonte from the east and connect at the station to the Bald Eagle line, Bellefonte’s citizens demanded improvements. In those days, a train station was a community’s front porch. The Centre Democrat newspaper lambasted the rickety wooden structure as “a miserable old shed of a depot that would be a disgrace to a way-station on a coal road.” Pressure for a finer station grew even more intense when a new railroad—soon to be known as the Bellefonte Central—began operating between Bellefonte and the Pennsylvania State College. It, too, used that “miserable old shed,” which townsfolk feared would present an image of ugliness to sophisticates traveling to or from the college.
The Pennsylvania Railroad finally yielded. The wooden station was relocated nearby to serve as a freight station, and its place taken by a new brick structure—the current station—opened on February 11, 1889. It contained a ticket and telegrapher’s office, baggage and express rooms, two waiting rooms, and accommodations for train crews laying over from distant points. PRR President George B. Roberts personally reviewed the blueprints and asked for a modification. “Mr. Roberts is anxious to have the plan revised,” one of his assistants told the architect, “so as to reduce the size of the gentlemen’s water closet and put additional room into the ladies’ water closet.”
At its peak, the station hosted as many as twenty regularly scheduled arrivals and departures daily, and tracks were located on both sides of the building. The most prestigious train to use the station was the Penn Lehigh Express, which operated between Easton and Pittsburgh by way of Williamsport and Lock Haven. It catered to the travel requirements of steel company executives at both ends of the state. As the twentieth century wore on, buses and especially automobiles lured away increasing numbers of travelers. Passenger service between Bellefonte and Snow Shoe ended in 1929. The Bellefonte Central stopped calling at the station in 1946, when it ceased passenger operations to State College. The daily train to and from Lewisburg made its last run in 1949, soon after losing its milk and mail contracts. On August 23, 1950, PRR exited the Bellefonte passenger business altogether when it withdrew the last pair of trains on the Bald Eagle Valley line, the weary remnants of the Penn Lehigh.
Since then, the train station has had a variety of railroad and non-railroad uses, and underwent restoration in the 1970s. Today, it stands as an emblem of community pride, and is home to the Chamber of Commerce, an office of the Centre County Convention and Visitors' Bureau, and the ticket office of the Bellefonte Historical Railroad Society.
