Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad and Coal Company
American short line railroad company
Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad (H&BTM) (reporting mark HBTM) is a former short line railroad company operating passenger and freight service on standard gauge track in south central Pennsylvania.
Operational headquarters were in Huntingdon and Saxton, with financial and business offices located in Philadelphia. The primary shop facilities were located in Saxton; auxiliary car shop facilities were at Huntington. Turntables were located at Huntingdon, Saxton and Mount Dallas, Pennsylvania.
History
Construction
The Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad and Coal Company was chartered on May 6, 1852, and organized on January 10, 1853. The purpose of the line was to provide a rail link from Huntingdon to Bedford, and to provide a competitive alternate route to local coal producers to break the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's monopoly on coal that was being shipped from the Cumberland, Maryland, area. The existence of high quality semi-bituminous coal in the Broad Top Mountain region was known since colonial times. Before the railroad, wagon or pole barge was the only practical method of bringing the coal from the remote region to market.
The 31 mile portion of the main line from Huntingdon to Hopewell, via Saxton and Riddlesburg, was completed in 1855. On February 3, 1859, the Bedford Railroad Company was chartered to provide a railroad connection for Bedford, and was incorporated February 19, 1859.
“Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad and Coal Company” enters the record as american short line railroad company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Huntingdon, Broad and Mountain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5945139. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1852, 1853, 1855 and 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Huntingdon and Broad Top Mountain Railroad and Coal Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.