Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad

We made our first big outing as a family of four a day trip up to northwestern PA to ride the Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad, a scenic train ride through Oil Creek Valley. Julian loves trains, Ally and I like exploring, and it is an affordable, not overly strenuous adventure, so the day trip made sense on multiple levels.

The train departs from Titusville, which is just under a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh. From March to October, the railroad runs a train on Saturdays and Sundays that leaves at 11:00 am and lasts three hours round trip. In June, July, and August, they also have a Wednesday ride. They offer first class and coach tickets. We paid $45 for a family pack, which included four tickets (two adults plus two kids) in a coach car, which was good enough for us. If you can get two two-person seats back-to-back, you can adjust the back of one so that two people can sit backwards to face the other two in your group and make the ride more intimate for your family. They have a small concession stand on the train. They also let you bring a packed lunch, which we did. You can find all the information about the ride on the railroad’s website here: https://octrr.org/.

Over the past few years, I’ve been taking Julian on scenic train rides because he loves trains so much, so for me, in addition to enjoying the QT with my boy and the scenery of the ride, I try to see the adventure as an opportunity to learn something about a new place. The theme here, if you couldn’t tell from the name of the railroad, was the oil industry and how it shaped this region for a period of time during the late 1800’s.

There was always oil underneath the ground in the area, so much, they said, that it was in the creek and would seep out of the grounds surrounding the creek. The Seneca natives who lived in the area would use the oil as medicine and face paint. Of course when the whites discovered that there was oil here, they had to exploit it and thus in 1859 began the Pennsylvania oil rush.

The train runs along Oil Creek through the valley. You can see the route on the map below. In 1862, three years into the oil boom, the Titusville and Oil Creek Railroad was incorporated by local businessmen, and from 1862 to 1865 the track was built along the river so that the train could travel up and down servicing the well sites.

Nowadays, this green strip of land shown in the picture above is the Oil Creek State Park. It has the winding creek with wooded areas on either side and a few bridges and parking lots scattered throughout. But, during the ride it's fun to try to imagine the area as it was during the oil boom with well sites everywhere. Each well site would consist of at least a wooden derrick (the tower) that handled the drilling cable, a boiler house that stored tools and supplies, and a storage tank. And of course, imagine all the commotion: Men working at the sites, transportation vehicles arriving and leaving, and smoke billowing through the air.

Below first is a picture I got from Wikipedia that shows what Oil Creek looked like during the 1860’s. After that are some pictures and a video that I took to show what the State Park looks like today. It was hard to get great pictures from inside the train behind a window, but they are enough to convey the general comparison.

The train’s first stop is where the oil rush started: Drake Well Oil Site. It was here in 1859 that Edwin Drake became the first person to successfully drill through rock for oil in the Oil Creek Valley. The Drake Well is considered the first modern, drilled (rather than dug) oil well in the world. Before long, news spread and the area exploded with activity. This era became known as the Pennsylvania Oil Rush, when for at least a decade people flocked to Oil Creek, setting up well sites to try their luck drilling for oil. This time is also analogously known in U.S. history as the “second gold rush,” or the “black gold rush.”

We didn’t get off the train and tour the site. The train just stopped briefly to pick up passengers waiting to get on. I was on the opposite side of the train, so I didn’t get any good pictures. I just copied this one below from Crawford County's website. I feel like going back to visit this site could a future trip in and of itself.

After 90 minutes on the rails southbound, the train stops at the site of Coal Oil Johnny’s house to turn around and let the passengers off for a break. Coal Oil Johnny’s House is the one shown in the picture below.

Coal Oil Johnny’s birth name was John Washington Steele. He was adopted into the McClintock family, who settled at this site in 1796 and built the house known in Johnny’s name. The McClintocks were a farming family. In fact, the entire Oil Creek valley was primarily an agricultural and lumbering area with small, family, subsistence-level farming. The McClintocks did collect 20-30 barrels of oil from an oil spring on their property, but this was before the oil boom.

In 1845, Culbertson McClintock and Sarah McKnight adopted John, forever changing John’s fortune. By 1864, both Culbertson and Sarah had died, and John inherited the property at the height of the oil boom. It was like being given a pot of gold. Instantly, he was fielding requests for loans, investments, and gifts. But, perhaps young and immature, John didn’t manage his newfound wealth well. He would spend periods of time in Philadelphia, where his wife, who was sick, could receive better medical treatment than was available in northwestern PA, and began blowing through his money, throwing parties, buying expensive clothing and jewelry, and paying for private transportation. In the big city, he became known as Coal Oil Johnny. He eventually lost all his money. His story spread and he basically spent the rest of his life moving around the Midwest running away from his reputation.

Each way, the train passes a station at Petroleum Center, a ghost town about halfway through the ride that to me seems like a microcosm of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush.

The first well was drilled here in 1860 on the George Washington McClintock Farm. Within six years, over 3,000 people lived here and a town was established. There was a bank, two churches, a theater, hotels and boarding houses, and a variety of stores. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant even visited the town.

However, the fall of the northwestern PA oil industry is almost just as notable as its rise. The boom, or rush, lasted for around 15 years or so until the mid-1970’s. For the next 25 years, the established companies continued producing oil, but production peaked in 1891 and completely ceased by 1901. By this point, the Standard Oil Company, which basically evolved into the Standard Oil Trust, an agreement between investors who pooled the securities of 40 companies into a single holding agency, monopolized and controlled almost the entire chain of oil production in the United States. They decided to shift their attention to more lucrative oil exploration ventures in other areas of the country, thus destining the oil industry in northwestern PA for collapse.

By 1873, just seven years after it was incorporated as a town, Petroleum Center was essentially abandoned. This station, which was actually built in 1989 in honor of the town, is one of the only structures that exists today as evidence that once upon a time there was a place called Petroleum Center.

Watch Rick Sheffer's YouTube video: 

It's basically a slideshow that he narrates over for 50 minutes, so simple, but great because he tells the history of the oil industry in PA in a chronological, comprehensible way with a ton of detail. There are all sorts of interesting tidbits that he shares--The teamsters, who drove teams of horses to service the well sites during the boom's early years, terrorizing the region once the oil pipeline was invented and replaced them, the fact that John Wilkes Booth was an oilman here for a year before he sold his stock and moved to Washington D.C. where he would assassinate President Lincoln months later, etc. etc. 

The Railroad operates the only USPS Railway Post Office car still in operation in the United States today.

There are a few wells in northwestern PA, but for the most part the oil industry is gone and all that exists today are museums, memorials, and landmarks to honor this aspect of the region’s history. The Perry Street Station isn’t only where you go to board the Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad train, but it’s also a museum exhibit devoted to the history of the railroad and the oil industry.

Here is Julian sitting in a speeder car, which is a small, motorized vehicle that runs on railroad tracks and is commonly used by maintenance crews for inspection, repair, and general track work.

These motels were funny to us. The railroad has taken old train cars from around the country, lined them up on their site across the parking lot from the station, and turned them into hotel rooms with beds, bathrooms, TV’s, and WiFi.

It was also at this point that I started to reckon with the timeline of everything that I had been learning. I found it remarkable that basically a 42-year period is so defining for this entire region. It has been 124 years since the oil industry collapsed, but still now in 2025, from everything I read and saw, pretty much all of the opportunities for historical or educational tourism in this region are connected to the old oil industry.

Jman insisted on inspecting and taking pictures with some of the train cars in the yard outside the station.

It seems like all the cities in Venango County that surround the Oil Creek Valley exist because they evolved to serve the oil industry in some capacity during the boom and the years that followed. We thought that we would complete our trip by driving through one or two of them and stopping somewhere for dinner.

• Titusville: The site of Edwin Drake’s 1859 oil well—the first commercially successful well in the U.S.
  
• Oil City: A major refining and shipping center located at the confluence of Oil Creek and the Allegheny River.
  
• Pithole: A short-lived but once-thriving boomtown that reached a population of 20,000 before its rapid decline.
  
• Franklin: An established town that became a center for oil industry services and commerce.
  
• Petroleum Center: A smaller community that developed between Oil City and Titusville, serving as a key point for oil transport and storage.
  
• Cranberry, Emlenton, and Foxburg: Secondary nodes in the oil network, primarily serving as transportation and shipping points for oil and supplies.

I got the map below from the Oil Region Alliance's website.

We stopped in Franklin. We are at Trails to Ales Brewery and played in Fountain Park after dinner. Franklin and so much of northwestern Pennsylvania is beautiful—Little towns with grand main streets that you can tell used to be bustling nestled in the rolling hills connected by winding roads and bridges over rivers with overlooking viewpoints. My story for the day stops here, but these other towns provide opportunities to return and learn more.