Service stop
Pottstown, PA
51 South Hanover Street
Why this stop matters
Pottstown was an iron town before it was a railroad town. John Potts, an ironmaster, laid it out in 1752 in the valley where the Manatawny Creek meets the Schuylkill, on ground where the province's first ironworks had been fired up decades earlier. When the Philadelphia & Reading main line reached the borough in 1838 it gave the forges and rolling mills a fast route to Philadelphia, and in time Pottstown steel went into works as distant as the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge.
That old Reading main line down the Schuylkill is the one 4014 pauses on in the center of town.