Steamtown Keeps Scranton's Railroad Heart Beating Downtown

Downtown Scranton holds a working piece of the age of steam. Steamtown National Historic Site, a National Park Service museum built on the former Scranton yards of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, preserves a working turntable and roundhouse, original buildings dating to the turn of the last century, and one of the country's great collections of steam locomotives.

The site tells the story of the railroad that built Scranton. The DL&W hauled anthracite coal and passengers between the Lackawanna Valley and the New York market, and its Scranton shops were among the city's largest employers for a century. Exhibits cover the technology of steam, the business of railroading, and the lives of the people who ran it — including the Big Boy No. 4012, one of the largest steam locomotives ever built, on display in the yard.

Steamtown is not a static museum. Rangers demonstrate the turntable, guided tours enter the locomotive shop where restoration work continues, and in season, excursion trains carry visitors through the yard and out toward the Lackawanna Valley and the Poconos, crossing the same bridges the freight era built.

The site pairs naturally with its neighbor across the parking lot, the Electric City Trolley Museum, and with the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel, the former DL&W passenger station turned hotel. Together they make downtown Scranton a place where a visitor can sleep in the station, ride behind steam, and walk the yards — the full circuit of how this city once moved America.

In the off-season the yard grows quiet, but the collection remains open to visitors, and the roundhouse work goes on. For Scranton, Steamtown is both an attraction and an argument: the industrial past here is not a ruin to apologize for, but a machine still worth explaining.