Early years The
track and
right of way was bought from the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1982 when the B&O discontinued operations on the old
Northern Subdivision between
Foxburg and Kane. This line was a part of the old
Pittsburgh and Western Railroad, originally a
narrow-gauge line created in the latter third of the 19th century from a merging of various earlier narrow-gauge lines. When the segment of the B&O from Foxburg to Knox was taken out of service, shipping raw materials, mostly glassmaking sand, to Knox Glass became difficult. To ease this situation, a connection with the
Conrail (originally the
New York Central Railroad) line through
Shippenville was put in place. The B&O and NYC crossed each other not too far west of Shippenville for many years, but there had never been provision for interchange between the two roads. Operations in to Knox, which had been the original southern terminus of the KKRR, were discontinued around the time the only real customer in Knox, the
Knox glass bottle company, ceased operations. This ended the use of the Shippenville interchange. After the Knox segment was embargoed, the southern terminus became what was known as North Clarion Junction, where there was a fibreboard plant and a wye, the tail track of which had been the P&W's line across to the east side of the
Clarion River to the borough of
Clarion (county seat of Clarion County). This branch was discontinued at around the time the B&O purchased the P&W. The bridge over the Clarion River needed replacement and the railroad requested that the town help with funding the project. Clarion's town fathers declined this honor, so the railroad cut back service to the west side of the river, which was eventually abandoned as well. At one time, the KKRR derived some revenue from shipping out car loadings of coal from what had once been an extensive coal mining complex in and around the village of
Lucinda, a few miles north of North Clarion Junction. During the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, under B&O ownership,
coal loadings from this area were quite extensive. A conductor's report from one northbound freight train (Foxburg to Kane) in the early 1960s showed in excess of fifty loads of coal shipped north out of Lucinda, most of it bound for ports on the Great Lakes. The last coal shipper on the line, Zacheryl Coal, went bankrupt not too many years after the KKRR acquired the line, which materially reduced shipping over the line, and thus reduced income.
Tourist Sloan Cornell purchased a portion the KKRR line in 1982 for use as a shortline freight railroad, and it later began operations in August 1987 as a tourist railroad, operating over the segment of the line from Kane to
Marienville (originally the site of another of the Knox Glass Bottle Company's plants), and back to Kane. It was imported new to the Knox and Kane, (one of only six steam engines imported from China after the end of steam in the States) and it was the KKRR's main steam locomotive for several years. In February 2003, workers from an
Ohio-based construction and repair company began to restore and stabilize the Kinzua Bridge to eventually reopen it for the KKRR. Rebuilding the bridge from its collapsed state was deemed too costly by state officials, so they instead left the ruins on display as a demonstration of the forces of nature. Following the collapse, the KKRR experienced a 75% decline in passenger ridership.
Final years The KKRR officially ceased tourist operations in October 2004 and freight operations followed suit by 2006. One reason was that freight shipments over the line had declined seriously over the years. An additional reason the line was abandoned as a tourist operation was that the main attraction of the ride was a trip over the Kinzua Bridge. In another devastating blow, on early Sunday March 16, 2008 the locomotives used to carry sightseers across the Kinzua Bridge were severely damaged by a fire set by arsonists. According to an article published in the Bradford Era newspaper immediately following the auction, the Kovalchicks reportedly had "little interest in resuming tourist rides along the rails." In the spring of 2010, Kovalchick removed the rail crossings between Clarion and McKean counties. {{Dead link == Locomotives ==