The Lehigh Valley Railroad reached Sayre, Pennsylvania, in the 1870s and developed a vast complex that eventually covered 250 acres with 21 major buildings and 80 miles of track between Sayre’s borders with Athens, Pennsylvania, and Waverly, New York. At the center were extensive mechanical shops, train yards, a roundhouse, the 1881 passenger station, a division office building, and auxiliary buildings used to build, repair, maintain, and operate the railroad. The massive Locomotive Shops, containing 283,140 square feet, or more than 6 acres under one roof, were completed in 1904 and were then the second largest locomotive shop in the world. During the years when coal-burning steam locomotives were built there, 277 were produced in Sayre by a workforce that at times numbered several thousand, and the shops, often called the Big Shops, were divided into bays for different stages of building and rebuilding locomotives, while other shops built cabooses, boxcars, milk cars, flatcars, and related items. Nearby, Sayre’s Round House had stalls for servicing or storing up to 50 steam locomotives and included a turntable to turn them around, but it was demolished in 1951. A 1948 fire at the coal pocket just north of the 1896-built Footbridge was extinguished by the Sayre Fire Department, saving the 75-foot-high structure, which stored coal for loading into tenders behind steam engines. As the Lehigh Valley Railroad declined and then ended, the need for the Sayre shops disappeared as well: the Power House smokestacks were demolished on April 14, 1977, the Power House having supplied electricity, steam, heat, and compressed air to all Lehigh facilities in Sayre, and in 1987 and 1988 the Locomotive Shops and other buildings were demolished.