Foxcroft Station & the Newtown Square Branch
By Sam Pickard
A century ago, if you stood at the bottom of Sproul Road just before it crosses Darby Creek into Haverford, there was a chance twice a day that you might hear a shrill whistle and the chugging of a steam locomotive as it pulled a train with cars full of stone and milk, puffing smoke from its stack as it moved past, the wheels of the cars clacking on the joints of the rail. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Newtown Square Branch passed through Marple from 1895 until 1963 and for many of those years it served a small flag stop called Foxcroft Station. Today, little is left of the railroad, but if you look closely, you can find remnants. This post will focus on the railroad as it pertained to Marple Township, especially the role of the Foxcroft Station and quarries.
Building the Railroad
While Delaware County can lay claim to the first permanent railroad (Thomas Leiper’s horse-drawn line in Nether Providence Township)[1] and was crossed by two early steam railroads—the Philadelphia & Columbia Railway (1832)[2] and the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad (1836)[3]—the interior of the county was not served by rail until the construction of the West Chester & Philadelphia Railroad (now SEPTA’s Media/Wawa Line) in the 1850s.[4] While this line opened up the southern and eastern townships of Delaware County to development, industry, and the faster shipment of agricultural products, the north-central area of the county, including Marple Township, were forced to rely on dirt roads and rudimentary turnpikes.
In an attempt to change this situation, the Philadelphia, Delaware & Chester Central Railroad was incorporated in March 1871, to build a railroad line from West Philadelphia to a point on the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, east of Frazer. The name was changed to Philadelphia & Chester County Railroad in 1872, but aside from a proposed route and some basic grading on a small portion of the route required by the railroad’s charter, little progress was made in the 1870s.[5] Despite this, an 1875 atlas of Delaware County depicts the projected railroad extending through the county on an alignment quite similar to the eventual Newtown Square Branch.[6]
The railroad, barely begun, went bankrupt and was sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1877.[7] The buyers pushed to build the line as a narrow-gauge railroad, and for a time in 1882 and 1883, it was rumored that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad were considering acquiring the route as a way to outflank the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad.[8] While nothing came of these rumors, work on grading the line appears to have begun in autumn 1882, continuing into March 1883, when work crews were reported to be near Newtown Square.[9] Unfortunately, the company again went into financial ruin, with newspaper stories in May 1883 reporting that the underfed and unpaid Italian railroad laborers were petitioning the Italian consulate in Philadelphia for assistance.[10]
Again sold by the sheriff, the railroad, now incorporated under yet another name (Philadelphia Midland Rail Road) attempted to complete the line in the second half of the 1880s, but once again failed financially after spending $478,884 on construction.[11] Sold yet again by the sheriff, the unlucky company was reincorporated a final time in 1890, as the Philadelphia & Delaware County Railroad.[12]
Now owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the small Philadelphia & Delaware County Railroad was finally to get off the ground, with “the people of Newtown Square and the neighboring country” actively advocating for the railroad.[13] The Delaware County American reported that 200 Italian railroad laborers were encamped at Manoa in July 1893,[14] and Philip W. Klaus wrote in a 1986 article that construction began several months later in October 1893.[15] The line began operation on June 30, 1894 as part of the Central Division of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad. While the line’s legal corporate ownership varied through the years, in practice, it was now the Newtown Square Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad.[16]
Passenger Trains to Foxcroft Station
When the railroad began operations in July 1894, there were 10 passenger stations along the line, one of which—Foxcroft—was located in Marple Township.[17] Foxcroft, named after a local estate,[18] was situated along the township’s northern border, on the east side of Sproul Road just before the road crossed Darby Creek (due to a later realignment of Sproul Road, this is several hundred feet west of the present route of Sproul Road).[19] The station was a flag stop, with trains only stopping when passengers either told the conductor that they wished to disembark or a passenger on the platform raised a “flag” for the oncoming train.
While Rev. Samuel F. Hotchkin described the station and surrounding area in an article titled “A Country Depot” in the Frankford Herald, it appears that no copies of the article have survived.[20] Maps indicate that the station probably had a timber platform on the north side of the tracks and by 1908 a water tank on the south side for locomotives.[21]
When service started in 1894, Foxcroft was serviced by four trains each way on weekdays. By April 1895, this had increased to seven round trips, but just a year later, it was down to three a day. In 1905, a single passenger train serviced the line.[22] What happened?
While there are definitely factors that would have affected ridership at Foxcroft Station (it was at the bottom of a steep hill, away from the center of population), the line as a whole suffered during this period because of the trolley line which the Philadelphia & West Chester Traction Company had opened along West Chester Pike in 1895.[23] While slower than the railroad, the trolley was cheaper and ran more frequently.[24] Extended to West Chester in 1898 and connecting with the Market Street Elevated at the Traction Company’s 69th Street Terminal in 1908, the trolley quickly outcompeted the passenger trains.[25] In 1908, just 14 years after it had begun, passenger service on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Newtown Square Branch ended.[26]
Freight Trains and Later Years
While passenger trains no longer made the trip to Newtown Square, freight trains did, and Foxcroft, with quarries sited nearby, became known for its stone. As early as 1899, Brenz & Tunbelston’s quarry was placing help-wanted ads in Philadelphia papers for “Quarrymen and laborers,”[27] and ten years later a property atlas of Delaware County prominently depicts a quarry along the railroad’s route at Foxcroft.[28] The stone gained renown, and was soon being used in sizable projects such as mansions, churches, and railroad stations.[29]
In 1919, when playwright Christopher Morley wrote a thinly-veiled description of a trip he had made into the Delaware County countryside for his column in the Evening Public Ledger, he called Foxcroft “a long-abandoned station… which is now only a quarry, and has the air of some mining settlement of the far West.”[30] While Morley would go on to describe the “fox-hunting country” surrounding the station with its “fair white mansions lingering among trees,” the brief description of the area along the railroad conjures up a vision of a dusty, gravely, barren landscape.
By the time the Sanborn Map Company published a fire insurance atlas covering the area around Foxcroft Station six years later in 1925, the former station site was not noted. A siding was located on the south side of the track east of Sproul Road and three small buildings related to W. A. Hayden’s Foxcroft Quarries and the Foxcroft Stone Co.’s Stuart Wood Quarries flanked the track.[31]
The Newtown Square Branch continued in operation through the 1920s and 1930s, with the one freight train a day being supplemented for a time in the 1930s by a passenger special, which hauled WPA workers from Philadelphia’s now-demolished Broad Street Station to Newtown Square for the reconstruction of Pennsylvania Route 252.[32] The close of the 1930s also saw the event that has lived on in railroad buff lore and provided fantastic photo documentation of the rail line—the rail fan trip of 1939.
The excursion trip, officially called “All Around Town,” was chartered by the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society and the Philadelphia Model Railroad Club and took place on March 5, 1939. The trip was mostly focused on showing off railyards and little-seen freight lines around Philadelphia; a category which the Newtown Square Branch fit into.[33] Traversing the entirety of the line, among the excursion train’s stops was Foxcroft, where railfans scurried up the hillside at the quarries to photograph the train in this somewhat pastoral landscape.[34]
After World War II, the line limped along, but the end was nigh. In July 1958, local historian Clarissa Smith was permitted to ride in the caboose of the daily freight train for a newspaper feature story she was writing. In the article, she treated the railroad line as a quaint relic of a bygone age, with the article focusing on the “ghost” of a young Edwardian woman “in a long white dress trimmed with lace,” and “a pink sash around her waist,” riding the train to visit her aunt in Newtown Square 50 years too late. Smith wrote of “Grass-grown sidings,” which “recalled businesses long abandoned, like the gold-fish sheds at Oakmont, [and] the Foxcroft quarry where 22 cars sometimes stood in line, loaded with stone to be sent across the country…”[35]
Just under five years later, in June 1963, the Pennsylvania Railroad informed remaining customers along the line that service beyond Grassland Station in Havertown was being discontinued due to the poor condition of the multiple trestles beyond that point. Rail service to Marple was ended. The remainder of the line limped along until 1982, when the Pennsylvania Railroad’s corporate successor, ConRail, received approval to discontinue service entirely.[36]
Little remains of the right-of-way, let alone any physical relics in Marple Township. Gone are the bridge and its abutments over Sproul Road, and gone is the bridge over Darby Creek to Haverford Township, though the stone piers still stand in the creek bed. A keen eye in winter months might just notice the elevated embankment of the old right-of-way as one travels north on Sproul Road, just before you cross the bridge over Darby Creek.
Assessment
The Newtown Square Branch has long had a mythos around it as a “lost railroad” and to this day is a popular local history subject. Yet, the railroad was a for the most part, a failure. While the railroad company had been incorporated in 1871, this incorporation was followed by more than two decades of financial failures, start and stop construction, and reincorporations. It was quite literally many a day late, and many dollars too short. During this period, other railroads were opened, creating charming commuter suburbs that endure to this day. Additionally, both West Chester and Downingtown already had two railroads leading into them: a third was simply not needed.
When the railroad was finally built, it was a relatively minor line that went (for all intents and purposes) nowhere. Not only did it fail to connect as originally planned with the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad’s vaunted Main Line, leaving it as a dead-end branch to a sparsely populated country township, it snaked across roads and through creek valleys to avoid hills—in the case of Marple township it avoided the center of population at Broomall due to the ease of building along Darby Creek. Even in communities like Newtown Square, where the railroad was near to the center of town, it had negligible effect as a commuter line, being quickly outcompeted by the cheaper and more frequent trolley line along West Chester Pike. While the Newtown Square Branch did see some freight use during the early and mid-20th century, the rise of trucking and replacement of farm fields with subdivisions made the maintenance of the line not financially feasible.
While the railroad had a limited impact on Marple’s landscape (or economy), and much of the right-of-way in the township has been lost to suburban development, it has benefited the surrounding townships. Portions of the former right-of-way in Haverford Township have been converted into trails and Newtown Township has begun the process to transform their portion of the former railbed into a trail.[37] Sadly, much of the right-of-way in Marple was long-ago lost to suburban development and the small remaining portions do not appear to have the potential for conversion into a trail.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Newtown Square Branch, be sure to check out Philip W. Klaus Jr.’s two-part series in the Philadelphia Chapter of the PRRT&HS’ High Line (1986-1987), and local historian Doug Humes’ November 2020 article on the railroad here.
[1] ExplorePAHistory.com, “Leiper Railway Historical Marker,” webpage, https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-1BC
[2] Gerald A. Francis, “The Philadelphia and Columbia Railway,” in The First 300: The Amazing and Rich History of Lower Merion, ed. Dick Jones (Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, Lower Merion Historical Society, 2000), available online at https://lowermerionhistory.org/?page_id=143158.
[3] Coverdale & Colpitts, The Pennsylvania Railroad Company: Corporate, Financial and Construction History of Lines Owned, Operated and Controlled To December 31, 1945, Volume II: Lines East of Pittsburgh (New York: Coverdale & Colpitts for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1947), 298-300.
[4] Coverdale & Colpitts, Lines East of Pittsburgh, 259-261.
[5] Coverdale & Colpitts, Lines East of Pittsburgh, 271-273; “The Doings of the Philadelphia and Chester County Railroad Company,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia), 23 December 1879, 2.
[6] Everts & Stewart, Combination Atlas Map of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Everts & Stewart, 1875), 2.
[7] Coverdale & Colpitts, Lines East of Pittsburgh, 270-271.
[8] “A New Railroad to Philadelphia,” Evening Dispatch (York, Pennsylvania), 7 November 1878, 1; “The Chester County Railroad,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 March 1882, 8; “Stocks and Bonds,” Times (Philadelphia), 27 April 1883, 3.
[9] “Work on the New Railroads,” Reading Times (Reading, Pennsylvania), 19 October 1882, 1; “Railway Building in Chester County,” Times, 8 March 1883, 2.
[10] “Italian Railroad Laborers Beaten,” Times (Philadelphia), 17 May 1883, 1; “Discontented Workmen,” Times, 24 May 1883, 1; “The Suffering Italians,” Times, 25 May 1883, 2; “The Victimized Italians,” Times, 29 May 1883, 3; “The Deluded Italians,” Times, 30 May 1883, 2.
[11] Coverdale & Colpitts, Lines East of Pittsburgh, 268-269.
[12] Coverdale & Colpitts, Lines East of Pittsburgh, 266-267
[13] “The Newtown Railroad,” Delaware County American, 13 April 1892, 3.
[14] “At Work on the Railroad,” Delaware County American, 19 July 1893, 2.
[15] Philip W. Klaus Jr., “The Newtown Square Branch,” High Line 7, no. 2 (Winter 1986-1987): 3.
[16] Coverdale & Colpitts Lines East of Pittsburgh, 243, 257, 267; Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 5.
[17] Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 5.
[18] S. F. Hotchkin, Rural Pennsylvania: In the Vicinity of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1897), 369.
[19] Ellis Kiser and J. M. Lathrop, Atlas of Delaware County East of Ridley Creek, volume I (Philadelphia: A. H. Mueller, 1909), plate 30; Frank H. M. Klinge, Atlas of Delaware County, Volume One (Lansdale, Pennsylvania: Frank H. M. Klinge, 1929), plate 34; Franklin Survey Company, Real Estate Atlas of Upper Darby, PA. and Vicinity (Delaware County — Volume II) (Philadelphia: Franklin Survey Company, 1942), plate 29.
[20] Hotchkin, Rural Pennsylvania, 370; Susan Couvreur, email to author, 26 June 2021. [A search for the article, referenced in Hotchkin’s 1897 book was graciously conducted by the staff of the Historical Society of Frankford, but it was not located in the surviving papers from the 1894–1897 range.]
[21] Ellis Kiser, Atlas of Properties on Main Line, Pennsylvania Railroad, From Overbrook to Paoli (Philadelphia: A. H. Mueller, 1908), plate 18.
[22] Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 5.
[23] Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 5.
[24] Ronald DeGraw, Red Arrow: The First Hundred Years 1848–1948 (Glendale, California: Interurban Press, 1985), 59–60.
[25] DeGraw, Red Arrow, 43, 73–74, 79–83.
[26] Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 5.
[27] “Wanted—Quarrymen…,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 June 1899, 8.
[28] Kiser and Lathrop, Atlas of Delaware County, plate 30.
[29] “The Latest News of Real Estate,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 August 1900, 7; “New Station By August,” Daily Courier (Bristol, Pennsylvania), 29 April 1911, 1; “Red Lion Boasts Unique Record,” Gazette and Daily (York, Pennsylvania), 29 March 1937, 9; “Killian Builds Residence Over Foundation Zell Dug,” Lancaster New Era (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), 10 March 1946, 14.
[30] Christopher Morley, “Travels in Philadelphia,” Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 18 August 1919, 10.
[31] Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Volume 4 (New York, New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1925), 470.
[32] Klaus, “The Newtown Square Branch, Part II,” High Line 7, nos. 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 1987): 31–32.
[33] Klaus, “Newtown Square Branch,” 10.
[34] Klaus, “Part II,” 26–28.
[35] Clarissa Smith, “‘Talking Ghost’ Rides Old Train From Llanerch To Newtown Sq.,” 31 July 1958, newspaper clipping in collections of Marple Historical Society [likely News of Delaware County [Upper Darby, Pennsylvania]].
[36] Klaus, “Part II,” 32–33.
[37] Newtown Township, “Rail Trail Feasibility Study,” webpage, https://www.newtowntownship.org/453/Rail-Trail-Feasibility-Study.