West Penn Railways
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| Locale | Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia |
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| Dates of operation | 1904–1952 |
| Predecessor | Brownsville Street Railway Co., Greensburg and Southern Electric Street Railway Co, Latrobe Street Railway Co., and others |
| Successor | None (Exception: Co-operative Transit Company was the successor of Wheeling area lines.) |
| Track gauge | 5 ft 2 1⁄2 in (1,588 mm) (Exception: Kittanning area lines were 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm).) |
| Length | 339 miles (546 km) |
| Headquarters | Connellsville, Pennsylvania |
West Penn Railways, one part of the West Penn System, was an interurban electric railway headquartered in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. It was part of the region's power generation utility.
West Penn Railways consisted of 339 miles (546 km) of electric trolley railway at its peak. It operated in a well populated mining region of rugged mountainous western Pennsylvania and connected numerous towns and villages with hourly or better transport from its north end towns at McKeesport, Latrobe and Trafford through the larger towns of Greensburg, Mt Pleasant, Connellsville, Scottdale, and Uniontown to southern most Fairchild and Martin. A branch extended to Brownsville on the Monongahela River. Some of its predecessor trolley companies operated as early as 1889 in the Greensburg area and as early as 1893 in the Wheeling area. West Penn Railways Company, as a separate corporate entity from its parent power company, was chartered on February 18, 1904. It operated a very active and inexpensive regional transportation service until August 9, 1952, when its last trolley ran on its one time busiest Uniontown to Greensburg line. Because much of its fare generating business was to bring residents of outlying areas into nearby towns for shopping and entertainment, particularly to see movies in the 1930s and 1940s, the West Penn's business declined with the decline in area mine and coking employment, the construction of better roads, and increased car ownership and use. An unsubstantiated story holds that once television reached the region, West Penn's management, facing an obvious future of fewer and fewer riders due to people staying home to watch TV, decided to abandon railway operations quickly. At one point near abandonment, the still well maintained big orange trolleys ominously carried signs reading, "To keep the 5c fare we need more riders".
Like most interurbans, West Penn's trolleys were powered from an overhead electric wire. The cars themselves were larger and heavier than typical city streetcars and were painted in a standout bright orange. West Penn's broad gauge (5' 2½") single track was laid in streets in towns, but in the countryside the track often ran on a right-of-way separate from roads. At some points, the West Penn's single track reentered a road in order to use a road bridge, and it sometimes ran not in the center of the bridge but on one side. Motorists had the unusual problem of facing a trolley approaching head-on in their lane. This odd arrangement also existed in some of the towns where the trolley ran alongside a curb. In the country, sidings allowed opposing cars to pass at various points, and a crude but effective block signal system protected the car's progress and required the West Penn motorman to reach from his trolley window and throw a toggle switch. West Penn had some impressively substantial bridges crossing ravines and valleys. Bridges at Footedale, Cob Run, and Brownsville Junction were particularly high and long. Typical for interurbans, stops were much more frequent than for a conventional railroad, curves were tighter, and gradients (slopes) could be much steeper. West Penn Railway as a vibrant transportation system played a key role in the pre-automobile unpaved poor road era and was an important factor in the region's economy. Three branches of the WPRy crossed the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
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