Westinghouse Interworks Railway

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The Westinghouse Interworks Railway was a small, private railroad in the lower Turtle Creek valley east of Pittsburgh. It was owned by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and ran along the north bank of Turtle Creek from Trafford through Wilmerding to East Pittsburgh. The line moved freight between Westinghouse plants and also tested and demonstrated electric rail cars.

The railway was chartered on February 25, 1902. In April 1903, it signed a 25-year lease to operate over part of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s East Pittsburgh Branch. J. C. Bair, a PRR engineer, became the Interworks superintendent in June 1903. Limited service began on August 9, 1903, and it became fully operational on December 1, 1904. It carried raw materials, finished products, and workers, and it sometimes used electric equipment to promote and test new trains.

By 1938 the Interworks Railway owned more than 40 pieces of rolling stock and ran about five miles of track between Trafford and East Pittsburgh. Westinghouse owned the sections near its plants, while connecting segments were owned by the PRR. The superintendent joked that, although their tracks weren’t as long as the PRR’s, they were “just as wide.”

The line helped grow the town of Trafford and is viewed today as having played a bigger role in local development than the nearby Turtle Creek Branch of PRR.

Decline and end: In the 1950s and 1960s, a flood-control project along Turtle Creek required removing the tracks between Wilmerding and Pitcairn, and the line was not rebuilt. On September 30, 1962, the rail link on the right bank between Trafford and Wilmerding was severed, and most of the track was eventually removed. The old rail bed is now largely abandoned, with a short segment in Wilmerding becoming the Airbrake Avenue Walking Trail.

The remaining section west of Wilmerding was bought by the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern Pennsylvania (RIDC) and renamed Keystone Commons, where limited rail activity has been seen in East Pittsburgh. North of Turtle Creek, the tracks fell into long disuse, with no trains since the 1980s. In 2014, Allegheny County rebuilt the Greensburg Pike bridge over the remnants of the railway, temporarily removing the rails. The county later restored them at a cost of about $365,000. The surrounding 10.1 acres of vacant land were valued at about $39,700 in 2017, and there are no plans to restore rail service.