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Concept
Reading Company
Summary
The Reading Company (ˈrɛdɪŋ ) was a Philadelphia-headquartered railroad that provided passenger and freight transport in eastern Pennsylvania and neighboring states that operated from 1924 until its acquisition by Conrail in 1976.
Commonly called the Reading Railroad and logotyped as Reading Lines, the Reading Company was a railroad holding company for the majority of its existence and a single railroad during its later years. It operated service as Reading Railway System and was a successor to the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company, founded in 1833. Until the decline in anthracite shipments from the Coal Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania following World War II, it was one of the most prosperous corporations in the United States.
During the later 20th century, competition with the modern trucking industry that began using the Interstate Highway System for short-distance transportation of goods, compounded the company's problems and forced it into bankruptcy in 1971.
After its railroad operations merged into Conrail in 1976, the remainder of the corporation was renamed Reading International.
The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (P&R) was one of the first railroads in the United States. Along with the Little Schuylkill, a horse-drawn railroad in the Schuylkill River Valley, it formed the earliest components of what became the Reading Company. The P&R was constructed initially to haul anthracite coal from the mines of the Coal Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. The original P&R mainline extended south from the mining town of Pottsville to Reading and then to Philadelphia. The lline followed the gently graded banks of the Schuylkill River for nearly all of the 93-mile (150-km) journey. From its founding in 1843, the original Reading mainline was a double track line.
The P&R became profitable almost immediately. Energy-dense coal, known as anthracite, had been replacing increasingly scarce wood as fuel in businesses and homes since the 1810s, and P&R-delivered coal was one of the first alternatives to the near monopoly held by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company since the 1820s.
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