Knox and Kane Railroad

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The Knox and Kane Railroad was a short railway line operating between Knox, in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, to Kane, Pennsylvania and then on to Mt. Jewett, Pennsylvania. The track and ROW was bought from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad when the B&O discontinued operation on the old "Northern Sub" between Foxburg, Pennsylvania and Kane. This line was a part of the old Pittsburgh and Western, originally a 3 foot narrow gauge line created in the latter third of the 19th century from a merging of various earlier narrow gauge lines. When the segment of the B&O from Foxburg to Knox was taken out of service, shipping raw materials, mostly glassmaking sand, to Knox Glass became difficult. To ease this situation, a connection with the Conrail (originally NYC) line through Shippenville was put in place. The B&O and NYC crossed each other not too far west of Shippenville for many years, but there had never been provision for interchange between the two roads. Operations in to Knox, which had been the original southern terminus of the K&K, were discontinued around the time the only real customer in Knox, the Knox glass bottle company, ceased operations. This also pretty well ended use of the Shippenville interchange.

After the Knox segment was embargoed, the southern terminus became what was known as "North Clarion Junction," where there was a fibreboard plant and a wye, the tail track of which had been the P&W's line across to the east side of the Clarion River to the town of Clarion, shire town of Clarion county. This branch was discontinued at around the time the B&O purchased the P&W. The bridge over the Clarion River needed replacement and the railroad requested that the town help with funding the project. Clarion's town fathers declined this honor, so the railroad cut back service to the sest side of the river, and later terminated even this service.

At one time, the K&K derived some revenue from shipping out car loadings of coal from what had once been an extensive coal mining complex in and around the village of Lucinda, a few miles north of North Clarion Junction. During the 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's, under B&O ownership, coal loadings from this area were quite extensive. A conductor's report from one northbound freight train [Foxburg to Kane] in the early 1960's showed in excess of fifty loads of coal shipped north out of Lucinda, most of it bound for ports on the Great Lakes. The last coal shipper on the line, Zacheryl Coal, went bankrupt not too many years after the K&K acquired the line, which materially reduced shipping over the line, and thus reduced income.

The K&K also ran a tourist railroad operation over the segment of the line from Kane to Marienville [originally the site of another of the Knox Glass Bottle Company's plants, and back to Kane. A Tangshan Locomotive and Rolling Stock Works-built 2-8-2 steam locomotive was acquired to power the tourist trains. As the B&O never saw a need to turn locomotives at Marienville, there was no wye or turntable in that community. So the K&K built a wye there, specifically to turn its steam locomotive.

As of the spring of 2006, the Knox and Kane ceased both freight and tourist service. One reason was that freight shipments over the line had declined seriously over the years. A second reason is that track condition on the line had deteriorated to the point that a large amount of money would be required to bring the track up to the point where it could safely be used. The owning company apparently either could not afford the cost of repairs or wanted a large amount of state and local governmental funding for the project and embargoed the line as a ploy to gain government assistance.