Built by Railroad Tycoons–Named for One
Sayre seemed to be carved out of the wilderness specifically for the bustling railroad business which, along with coal, dominated 19th century Pennsylvania. Sayre is a borough in Bradford County, about 60 miles northwest of Scranton and just a few miles south of the New York State line.
In 1870 a couple of speculating bankers bought land and then convinced railroad tycoon Asa Packer to have a look at their plans. Packer was the head of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which was trying to push north from Pennsylvania into New York State. As legend has it, Howard Elmer, one of the bankers, took a party of railroad men to a hillside to give them a view of the plain where the town would be built. Robert H. Sayre, president of the Pennsylvania and New York Canal and Railroad Company and superintendent of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, reportedly exclaimed: “What a magnificent location for a great city!” Mr. Elmer replied, “If that is your opinion, Mr. Sayre, we will build a town and call it by your name.” And so Sayre was born.
The borough was incorporated in 1891 and by 1904 the giant train yard was built, at one point the second largest facility of its kind in the world. Cranes could lift an entire locomotive engine and move it from one spot to another inside the building. It was said that the giant train yards could build or rebuild steam locomotives at the rate of one a day. Nearly everyone in Sayre worked for the railroad. Railroad money funded the famed Robert Packer Hospital and the Guthrie Clinic, which still stand today.
Sayre hummed until trains and train travel in America began to shrink after World War II. The Lehigh Valley Railroad was taken over by a succession of groups, the final one being Conrail in 1976. Track was dismantled, business dried up, the town population dropped by a third and the now-shrinking Sayre rail yards essentially lapsed into a permanent sleep.
Along Came Marcellus….
For decades, every geologist involved in Appalachian Basin oil and gas knew about the black shale called Marcellus. The color made it easy to spot in the field and its unique signature was easy to identify. As recently as 2002, the US Geological Survey estimated there might be as much as 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas contained within the shale. However, spread over the huge area of West Virginia, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania and buried a mile or more beneath the surface, it was thought to be expensive to recover and would probably not yield very much gas per acre.
Starting in 2003, everything changed. In Washington County, PA, Range Resources combined two relatively new forms of retrieval, horizontal drilling and fracturing, or “fracking.” Fracking involves injecting a mix of 99% water and sand with chemicals to break up the shale and release the gas. The first manufacturing of natural gas using this method began in 2005. By the end of 2007, 375 wells with suspected Marcellus were permitted in the Keystone State. Horizontal wells were often producing more than a million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
In 2008, huge news broke on the Marcellus research front. Two geology-related professors estimated that the Marcellus shale beds might contain more than 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, hundreds of times more than originally thought. With horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, 10% of that gas (50 trillion cubic feet) could be recoverable. This would yield enough natural gas to supply the entire United States for two years and have a wellhead value of nearly a trillion dollars. The rush was on!
A Rebirth of Railroads and Railroad Towns
Suddenly, Northeastern Pennsylvania became a destination for mining and supply companies from across the country. The Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority could see it coming. “The Marcellus shale industry was part of a national upswing,” said Authority President Larry Malski. “There has been a renaissance in rail freight transport across the country.” The reasons were simple. “Each rail car holds the equivalent of 4-5 trucks,” explained Malski. “It’s more efficient and creates far less pollution to bring goods by rail.”
Linde Corporation was already involved in laying midstream pipelines to carry natural gas from the wellheads and knew the potential. Linde joined with TRAC to lease the Carbondale Rail Yards from the Authority. They purchased 25 acres from Bradford County to operate the Sayre Rail Yards. TRAC laid thousands of feet of new rail and Linde improved the sites to provide acres available to host companies and supplies from Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota and the entire far West.
“Sayre is located in Bradford County,” said Malski. “It’s a perfect place for the drilling activities going on now.”