The true part:

After the Civil War, just north of the Maryland line along the Susquehanna River, the businessmen of Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania, hatched a plan to build the Peach Bottom Railway.

The narrow gauge line was begun, with mighty aspirations to run from Philadelphia to the Appalachian coal fields. As it grew the line was reorganized and renamed several times.

The Eastern division became the Lancaster, Oxford and Southern.

The Middle division became the Peach Bottom Railroad, then the York and Delta Railway, then the Maryland Central Railroad, and eventually the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad; or Ma & Pa. Well known in Baltimore into the 1950s. The Ma & Pa still operates around York Pennsylvania.

The town of Peach Bottom is now under the waters of the Susquehanna River above the Conowingo Dam.

And the story of the Western division has remained untold,
until now...

The should be true part: 

The History

as told to Kevin Hunter, October 7, 2008

When the Peach Bottom Railway assembled its board of directors in 1871, Nostradamus One was included. Mr. One was from the productive industrial and farming interests of the Hanover, PA area, and was thus the only board member to represent any area of the Western Division.

The thick German accent common to the area at the time may have added to the poor communication that haunted the development of the line west. But no cause of confusion was greater than the name of the strongest proponent of the Peach Bottom Railway's Western Division.

In the style of the day, Nostradamus abbreviated his written name "No.", and in a minor tragedy of English translation signed into his arrangement with the company as "No. One". In some cases updates and invitations were lost or miss-delivered, but eventually they were simply no longer forwarded to No-One.

The confusion persists to this day where in the George W. Hiltons book "A History of the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad" it declares, "... no one from the western reaches of the proposed line was represented in the new company."

Quite to the contrary Mr. One was quite productive. Collecting subscriptions from businessmen and farmers of the area, the Western Division was well funded. The news of the Railway's decision to go to York, and not to Hanover Junction was never received, and so the Middle and Western Divisions never actually met. This may have been fortuitous since the single document that reached the Western Division describing the track gauge stated a gauge of 3' 0" but had been misread as 30", and the entire Western Division had been built to that incompatible gauge.

Mr. One took lack of communication from the primary company as a vote of confidence, and proceeded to procure rights of way, grading, facilities, engines, and rolling stock, continuing in a matter-of-fact way towards the time when the Middle division would complete its construction. When they never appeared, he took solace in the fact that their failure had not been his.

Without a directive from its eastern founders, the Western Division grew to meet needs as they presented themselves, sprawled across the Pennsylvania and Maryland countryside, grew to a modest prosperity, and a pleasant old age.

The Western Division, having been written off the books by the rest of the company as early as 1873, was never missed, and remains undocumented to this day.

The narrow rails of the Peach Bottom - Western Division, so long neglected by history and historian, have developed an almost leprechaun quality. In many places it still runs; ‘though without apparent connection between many of it's distant routes. It may often be found just around a bend or on the far side of the hill. Photography of the line remains "slippery" at best. Even the operators sometimes doubt its existence.