Reading & Northern Railroad HO Scale Models

The Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad traces its origins to 1983, when the Blue Mountain and Reading Railroad was established to assume freight operations over a segment of former Pennsylvania Railroad trackage in eastern Pennsylvania, specifically the Schuylkill Division corridor between Hamburg and Temple that Conrail was relinquishing. Almost from the beginning the new company showed an appetite for expansion and for passenger excursions, inaugurating steam-hauled trips as early as 1985 using two historic locomotives: a 4-6-2 acquired from the Gulf, Mobile and Northern Railroad numbered 425, and Reading Company T-1 4-8-4 number 2102. These excursions gave the fledgling railroad a public profile that went well beyond its modest freight operations. The pivotal transformation came in 1990, when the company acquired approximately 150 miles of track in the anthracite coal region north of Reading from Conrail, a collection of lines Conrail had grouped together as the Reading Cluster. This acquisition more than doubled the railroad's footprint and prompted both a name change to the Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad and a relocation of headquarters from Hamburg to Port Clinton. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the RBMN continued assembling a network from the remnants of several historic predecessors, adding lines with heritage tracing to the Reading Railroad, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The result was a through route connecting Reading with Scranton, a connection that had never previously existed under the control of a single railroad operator. The railroad's reporting mark, RBMN, reflects this assembled identity. By the early twenty-first century the RBMN had grown into the largest privately owned Class II railroad in the United States, a distinction that reflects both the scale of its acquisitions and the viability of anthracite coal and other bulk commodities as freight revenue sources. The emergence of Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in northeastern Pennsylvania between roughly 2009 and 2010 brought additional traffic in frac sand and related materials, prompting the railroad to invest in yard upgrades and new equipment. In 2021 the railroad purchased the 19.5-mile Panther Valley line outright from Carbon County for approximately 4.7 million dollars, converting a trackage rights arrangement into full ownership and allowing the RBMN to control maintenance and dispatching over that segment independently. Passenger excursions have remained a defining characteristic of the railroad throughout its history. The Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, a subsidiary based in Jim Thorpe, began offering regular seasonal service in 2005 and has become a recognized tourist attraction in the region. Weekend excursions running from Reading and from Pittston to Jim Thorpe have expanded the passenger program further, using refurbished Budd-built Rail Diesel Cars that once served SEPTA's regional diesel routes. The restoration of locomotive 2102 to operational condition in 2022 allowed the RBMN to revive the Reading Company's historic Iron Horse Rambles program, connecting the modern railroad's identity directly to one of its most celebrated predecessors and underscoring the RBMN's unusual position as both a working regional freight carrier and a steward of mid-Atlantic railroad heritage.