Strasburg
"In Strasburg the trains are older than the highway, and somehow they're still the faster way to see the county."
A Lancaster County railroad town where steam locomotives still haul passengers past Amish farms and a museum houses engines the size of small buildings. Lia and I rode a wooden coach behind a hissing steam engine while a horse-drawn Amish buggy kept pace with us on the parallel road, which felt like watching two centuries argue politely.
Strasburg sits deep in Lancaster County’s Amish farmland, and the first thing we noticed pulling in wasn’t the town itself but the traffic — a mix of pickup trucks, tourist buses, and horse-drawn buggies all sharing the same two-lane road without much apparent friction. This is railroad country as much as Amish country, home to the oldest continuously operating railroad in the United States, and Lia had specifically routed us here for the steam trains, a childhood obsession she’d never quite outgrown and that Strasburg indulges completely.
Riding the Strasburg Rail Road
We bought tickets for a forty-five-minute round trip on the Strasburg Rail Road, boarding a restored wooden coach behind a coal-fired steam locomotive that announced its departure with a long, satisfying whistle blast. The route runs directly alongside Amish farmland, and for most of the ride a horse and buggy kept pace with us on the parallel road, two very different technologies moving at almost exactly the same speed. Our conductor, dressed in period uniform, explained the line dates back to 1832, originally built to haul limestone and grain before tourism became its real business.
The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Across the tracks, the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania houses dozens of full-size locomotives under one soaring roof, engines so large that walking beneath them felt almost architectural rather than mechanical. We climbed into the cab of a hulking freight engine and Lia, who’d been narrating train facts to me all morning, finally ran out of things to say, just staring up at the scale of the thing in silence. It’s a rare museum where the exhibits genuinely dwarf the building meant to hold them.
Getting There
Strasburg is about 15 minutes southeast of downtown Lancaster and roughly 90 minutes west of Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) via US-30 and PA-896. A car is essential for getting around the county’s back roads, though the town itself, with the rail attractions clustered together, is easy to explore on foot once you’ve arrived.
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