I've been running The Wayne Train a good while now. I always knew I would get around to Wayne County one of these days.

Turns out it's the birthplace of the American railroad.

You can't make that up.

Up in the far northeast corner of Pennsylvania, where the state runs out and bumps into New York, there's a stretch of high woods and cold lakes and one river town called Honesdale. Around fifty thousand people, spread thin across the Pocono foothills. Named, the whole county, for a man who never set foot in it.

General Anthony Wayne. Revolutionary War. So reckless in a fight the men took to calling him Mad Anthony, and he wore it like a medal. He died of the gout in 1796, out on the Ohio frontier. Years later his son dug him up to carry him home, and the way they tell it, they boiled the flesh off the bones to make the load lighter for the wagon. Some of those bones are said to have bounced off along the road. Every New Year's, the story goes, old Mad Anthony rides out looking for them.

They named a quiet county full of church picnics after that man. All right then.

But the railroad. That's the thing here.

August of 1829, they hauled a locomotive up to Honesdale off a ship from England. Called it the Stourbridge Lion. Fired it up and ran it down a set of wooden rails, and it became the first steam locomotive ever to turn a wheel on a commercial track in this country.

It was also too heavy. Buckled the rails, spooked everybody watching, and after a run or two they parked it and never ran it proper again.

That's the whole American railroad, right there in one afternoon. Born in a little mountain town. A magnificent failure that changed the world anyway.

The real Lion sits down in the Smithsonian now, in Washington. Honesdale kept a replica. That's about the size of how things go up here — the country takes the real one to the capital and leaves the county a good copy. And the county's fine with it.

The reason the Lion came at all was coal. A canal ran a hundred and eight miles from Honesdale down to the Hudson, and for most of the 1800s this town fed New York City its heat, barge by barge, black rock out of the mountains. The railroads that Honesdale helped dream up eventually made the canal pointless. The water went still. The town that invented the future got passed by it.

Let me tell you about a few of the people.

David Wilmot was born in a house over in Bethany in 1814. Went to Washington as a congressman. And in 1846 he stood up and tacked one sentence onto a spending bill — that slavery should never be allowed in any land the country took from Mexico. Just that. The Wilmot Proviso. It failed. Failed every single time somebody brought it up. But it drew a line clean down the middle of the country, North on one side and South on the other, and the men who rallied behind that line went off a few years later and built the Republican Party. A fellow from a little Pennsylvania mountain county wrote one sentence that helped light the fuse on the Civil War.

Samuel Meredith held the whole country's money first. First Treasurer of the United States, appointed by George Washington himself in 1789, back when there wasn't much money to mind and half of it was owed to somebody. Meredith lent the broke young government better than a hundred thousand dollars of his own, and the government never paid him back. He came home to his estate near Pleasant Mount and died there in 1817. First man to ever mind the nation's cash, and it cost him plenty.

Christian Dorflinger came the other direction. A glassmaker out of France, sick and worn out at thirty-three, who'd already made his money in the New York factories and quit for his health. Bought a fifteen-hundred-acre farm near Honesdale to sit still on. Couldn't do it. Built a glass furnace right there on the farm, and by 1865 he had a full works going at White Mills. Dorflinger crystal went on the tables of the White House for decades. On Navy ships. In the palaces of Europe. Seven hundred men, at the peak of it, cutting glass in a Wayne County mill town. He died at White Mills in 1915. The factory closed a few years after, and the trade drifted off to Corning, over the New York line.

Notice a pattern yet. The county makes the thing. The thing moves on.

When you get hungry, go to Scarfalloto's Towne House Diner, 920 Main Street in Honesdale. It's a real diner — an actual 1930 model, trucked into town and set down on an empty lot. Back then the men who built these things gave them that long, low, railroad-car look on purpose. A diner was supposed to feel like a train you could sit down and eat in. Speed. Progress. The future, with a coffeepot.

So there it sits. In the town where the railroad was born. A restaurant shaped like a train.

The Scarfalloto family runs it. All-day breakfast, fresh bread out of their own oven, pizza they put in later. Been feeding Wayne County the better part of half a century. No chain. Just a family and a diner that thinks it's a locomotive.

That's Wayne County for you. It builds the thing and lets it roll on down the line. The first engine went to the Smithsonian. The coal went to New York. Wilmot's sentence went to the whole country. Dorflinger's crystal went to the White House. Even Mad Anthony's bones went home without him.

What's left is the prettiest quiet corner of Pennsylvania, a lake for every day of the week, and a Main Street diner built to look like the trains that made the place famous and then left.

Come see your neighbors.