Olean, New York

Olean is a city in eastern Cattaraugus County.  It was served by the Erie Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad,and Pittsburgh, Shawmut and Northern Railroad. Numerous street railways and interurban lines also serviced Olean and are not shown on the map.  Olean was a center for the lumber industry, and later for the petroleum industry in the region.  It was a commercial port and was the southern end of the Genesee Valley Canal.

The 1898 topographic map below shows the major railroads coming into Olean at the time.  The Erie Railroad is shown in green, the Pennsylvania Railroad is shown in red, and the Pittsburgh, Shawmut and Northern Railroad is shown in blue.  The map does not include the many spurs and sidings throughout the city.

Erie Railroad

The Erie arrived in Olean in 1851 when the New York and Erie Railroad completed its main line from Piermont to Dunkirk.  The railroad did not have a large presence in the city, but did have freight and passenger stations just east of the crossing with the Pennsylvania Railroad as illustrated in the 1886 map below.

This line is still is use and is operated by the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad

Pennsylvania Railroad

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the dominant railroad in Olean and was the junction of three different lines.  The main PRR route through town was the north-south line between Buffalo and Pennsylvania.  North of Olean the PRR split and one line continued to Buffalo while the other followed the old Genesee Valley Canal to Rochester.  This is now the Norfolk Southern Buffalo Line between Buffalo and Harrisburg.

The line shown in the map above coming in from the southwest corner was the former Olean, Bradford and Warren Railroad line going to Bradford. 

The line coming in from the west and paralleling the Erie was the line that went Salamanca and then followed the Allegheny River south into Pennsylvania. 

The PRR had a large station downtown near the corner of Sullivan and Union streets as shown in the 1891 map below.  To the PRR main line was north of the station while the narrow-gauge Lackawanna and Pittsburg (later part of the Pittsburgh, Shawmut and Northern) and narrow-gauge Olean, Bradford and Warren met.  The postcards below the map show what the PRR station in Olean looked like.

Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern

Olean was the western terminal for the Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern Railroad.  This line began in 1881 as the narrow-gauge Olean Railroad that extended east through Ceres to Bolivar.  The line went through a series of ownership changes, eventually becoming the Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern.

I believe that the PSN and predecessor railroads initially used the PRR station in Olean.  A 1915 map (below) shows a PSN station just north of Green Street between Union and Barry Streets.

Newspaper Articles

References