Steamtown National Historic Site

The site sits on the former yard of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, a line that hauled anthracite coal and passengers through northeastern Pennsylvania. Rather than gathering a few locomotives into a hall, the park preserved the yard itself, the roundhouse where engines were serviced, the turntable that swung them onto its stalls, and the shops where crews kept them running.

The core of the collection came from a wealthy seafood magnate who amassed steam locomotives and railroad equipment in the mid-twentieth century, as steam was giving way to diesel. That collection eventually came to Scranton and, with the historic Lackawanna yard as its home, became a national historic site devoted to the story of steam railroading in America.

The heart of any visit is the locomotives. They range from small industrial switchers to huge mainline engines built to pull heavy trains over the mountains, their driving wheels taller than a person and their boilers the size of a rail car. Seeing them up close conveys the sheer scale and power of steam railroading in a way no photograph can.

The working turntable is a favorite spectacle. A locomotive is rolled onto the great rotating bridge and turned to line up with one of the stalls of the roundhouse, just as it was done in daily service. Walking through the roundhouse and shops, visitors see where the constant, dirty, skilled work of keeping steam engines alive was carried out.

In season, Steamtown offers short excursion rides that let visitors experience a train firsthand, sometimes behind steam power and sometimes behind vintage diesels. The rides carry passengers out along historic track and back, giving a taste of what rail travel felt like in the era the site preserves.

Because the excursions and live demonstrations depend on the availability of the equipment and the season, they run on a rotating schedule rather than every day. Checking ahead is worthwhile, since a ride or a live turntable demonstration turns a museum visit into a working encounter with the age of steam.

Scranton grew on anthracite, the hard, clean-burning coal mined from the surrounding hills, and on the iron and railroads that the coal fueled. Immigrant workers from across Europe came to dig the mines and build the lines, and their labor, often dangerous and hard-fought, drove the region's boom. Steamtown's locomotives are one chapter of that larger industrial story.

The wider region is the ancestral homeland of the Lenape and the Haudenosaunee peoples, who lived in the river valleys of northeastern Pennsylvania before displacement pushed them westward in the eighteenth century, with descendant nations continuing elsewhere today. The valley they knew was later reshaped by coal and steel, and Steamtown, alongside the nearby coal mine tour, preserves the memory of the industry that transformed it.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.