Exiting a cut along the main road.
You could follow the sign, orrrrr you could just follow the train. This classic sign has been there as long as the EBT has been a tourist railroad, and it was actually receiving fresh paint when I drove by early in the morning.
Arriving back into Orbisonia.
Posing in front of the depot, ready to head north for the last time of the day.
Passing the sign while heading north.
In reply to NickD :
That looks like a great ride.
So, last night I made the drive to Strasburg, spent the night at the Soudersburg Inn, and then woke up this morning to go to Strasburg Rail Road to photograph and video the #611. I figured they would also be operating #475 as well, since they like to run the two N&W locomotives at the same time. I wasn't as hung up as getting photos of #475, since I just spent a day photographing that a month ago, but also, live steam is live steam. So, here we go, #475 climbing up out of Leaman Place.
The Queen of Steam herself, climbing the grade from Cherry Hill Road to Esbenshade Road under a nice plume of gray smoke. She is a gorgeous machine. The field of oats in the foreground is a nice touch.
The nice thing about when they're running two trains is that its almost like a shooting gallery. The #611 went back into Strasburg, unloaded her train, went back by tender-first, and then not long after the #475 came through.
Headed towards the Paradise Lane crossing, in front of the Red Caboose Motel.
I then went down to the Leaman Place junction, where Strasburg interchanges with NS. This is the old PRR electrified line to Harrisburg, and so Amtrak does run electric Siemens ACS-64s on this line. But this was the westbound Pennsylvanian, which runs from NYC to Pittsburgh, and so it had a GE P42DC Genesis on the head end instead. They were really wheeling as they passed through.
The #611 running around it's train at Leaman Place.
The eastbound Pennsylvanian was running late and there was hopes by those gathered at Leaman Place that it would pass by as #611 was down there as well. Sadly, it did not cooperate, passing by after #611 left. I then remarked that I was in electrified Amtrak territory, a rarity for me, and both trains I'd seen so far were diesel-powered.
The #475 running around her train at Leaman Place. There were no incidents with excavators today.
I stayed at Leaman Place, because there was a Keystone Service train with an ACS-64 due through and once again, there were hopes that the timing would line up.
And, hey, it happened. An Amtrak Keystone Service train kicks up some dust as it screams through Leaman Place behind an ACS-64.
N&W #475 headed towards Carpenter's Crossing, taken from the other side of the track. I'll be honest, I wish Strasburg would put the #475 back to it's early configuration, with the high-mounted headlight and slatted pilot. I like that much better than the later appearance that it currently wears with the centered headlight and the footboards.
Playing a little bit of catch-up here, because my wi-fi at the hotel on Saturday night was absolutely horrendous and took 3 hours to unpload two sub-5 minute videos, and then I don't have internet at my house.
So, the #611 doing the whole "Ghost Whistle" schtick that they do at Carpenter's Crossing. The whistle that is on it is off of #609 and has a subtly different tone than what was on it when I saw it back in '21. Differences in wear or metallurgy or damage or old repairs, and often slight modifications performed by engineers back in the day or by subsequent owner to tune the whistle, result in no two sounding alike, even if they are of the same design.Kelly Anderson talked about how when Strasburg was running PRR #1223 and #7002, even though they both had PRR 3-chime whistles of the same design and era, the #1223's whistle sounded great, while the #7002's was much more shrill and screechy.
The #611 departing from Leaman Place after having run around it's train. The fireman onboard for Saturday was definitely on the enthusiastic side, with a good bit of smoke and a lot of lifting of the safety valves. Funny enough, on the bulkhead of the tender, there is actually "Black Smoke Is Waste" that dates back to her original career. In fact, when N&W hired O. Winston Link to photograph the railroad, he was told that he could not publish any photos of engines smoking excessively or with the safety valves lifted, because both were indication of inefficient firing and wastefulness.
So, Sunday was where I completely deviated from my plan. So, as I said, I originally intended to chase the inaugural R&N Pittson-Jim Thorpe excursion, pulled by the F-units, but I had a reading comprehension failure, and it turned out that the inaugural trip was Saturday. I held out hope that R&N was going to make a last-minute announcement that the F-units were going to be used either for the entire weekend of Pittston-Jim Thorpe or for the Lehigh Gorge Scenic runs. It would have been pretty on-brand for the R&N, but sadly it didn't happen. The Facebook grapevine reported that a pair of GP38-2s would be handling the trip on Sunday and Monday, and that really didn't interest me too much. So I decided to go visit Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine & Steam Train in Ashland, PA instead.
The Pioneer Tunnel is a horizontal drift mine that was owned by Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company that closed in 1931 and was opened as a tourist attraction in 1961. It extends one third of a mile into the mountain, hitting seven different veins of anthracite along the way, including the 50-foot wide Mammoth Vein. The ride down into the mine uses three converted mine cars and one of the battery-electric mine locomotives.
I don't have any good photos of the mine interior, because it's really dark in there, even with the electric lights that they have added and the LED headlamp on the tour guide. At one point, just to give an idea what it actually would have been like, they turned off all the lighting, leaving just a signal helmet lamp, and then the guide even clicked that off. You could hold your hand up two inches in front of your face and not see it when he did that. If you go, remember to bring a jacket and wear shoes and pants that you aren't concerned about. On an 80 degree day, it was 48 degrees down there, and there's water dripping from the ceiling and the floors are quite muddy.
After coming back out of Pioneer Tunnel, it was then over to the "Steam Train" part of Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine & Steam Train. They have a 42" gauge Vulcan 0-4-0 saddle tank engine from Lehigh Coal & Navigation and four mine cars, three converted to open-air passenger cars and one converted into a caboose, and they run 3/4s of a mile up the mountainside to the top of the mountain, where the top portion of the mountain was strip-mined off, and where the breaker had once been.
Pioneer Tunnel is very open about capacity limitations on the tunnel and train rides, and as I was standing there, the train cars were filling up. Their brakeman, who was a guy roughly my age with the sleeves cut off his employee T-shirt, Pit Vipers, an absurd mullet and an '80s 'stache, comes up to me and goes "Hey, man, the cars are going to be full, and you're traveling by yourself, would you mind riding in the cab to free up some space for families?" WOULD I MIND?! Hell, no I wouldn't mind. So I got to swing up into the cab of a Vulcan 0-4-0T and ride it up the mountainside. It was a hot, rough ride but the little engine was surprisingly quiet, and because it burns pure Pennsylvania anthracite, there was no smoke or cinders. The engineer, who went by "Juice", said that Robert Kimmel, the blind gentleman who restored CNJ #113, was instrumental in getting the #1 running and comes up to help out with routine maintenance.
We shoved up the mountainside and got off at the top of the mountain. You can see where the coal company strip-mined the top off the mountain. Normally, a mining company was required to refill strip mining with overburden after they were done, but because the mine closed during the Great Depression, well, there wasn't anyone really left to fill it back in.
This is the view out over the valley. Once upon a time, there was a coal breaker over here, where they shoved the coal from the strip mine into, but that is long gone. Sadly, the amount of surviving coal breakers in Pennsylvania is pretty much nil. There was an attempt to preserve the massive Huber Breaker in Ashley, PA but it was decided to sell it for scrap. The state instead decided to sell it to Paselo Logistics for demolition and remediation, and they extracted a significant amount of metal from the site that they sold for profit, then all but abandoned the rest of the materials and contaminated on site, leaving behind unresolved violations of Pennsylvania's environmental laws, and vanished with the money.
They also had a recreation of a bootleg mine, which were common during the Great Depression.
Then it was back aboard the train and down the hillside.
Very cool experience and museum and I 100% recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in this sort of stuff.
A little off-topic, but Ashland is not far from Centralia, and the guides at Pioneer Tunnel even encourage guests to go over there and visit Centralia. They didn't need to tell me, twice, so I charted a route up to Centralia, stopping for pineapple Dole Whip at an ice cream stand along the way, and made my way to the ghost town.
For those not familiar, Centralia had a coal mine fire underneath it in the '60s that caused the state to evict people from Centralia. The exact cause of the fire is still debated; most state that on May 27, 1962, the firefighters set the trash dump, built in an abandoned strip mine, on fire and let it burn for some time to clean up the landfill, and that it lit a vein of coal that reached the surface and allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Others claim that the fire had when a trash hauler dumped hot ash or coal discarded from coal burners into the open trash pit, as the borough council minutes from June 4, 1962, referred to two fires at the dump and that five firefighters had submitted bills for "fighting the fire at the landfill area." The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer of the landfill but fell behind schedule, leaving the barrier incomplete. This allowed the hot coals to penetrate the coal seam underneath the pit and start the subsequent subterranean fire. Another theory proposes that the Bast Colliery fire of 1932 was never fully extinguished, and that fire reached the landfill area by 1962.
In the 1970s, the city began having all sorts of issues: sinkholes, carbon monoxide poisoning, steam rising through cracks in the ground, the gasoline in underground fuel tanks being measured at 175 degrees. There were attempts to flood the mines with water (just caused huge steam vents because the mines were 2800-3000 degrees), filling it with dirt (you'd need to level entire mountains) and strip mining the top layer off and putting it out like was done at Shenandoah (so large of a scale that no mining company would take it on for fear of bankrupting themselves). In 1992, the state finally took over and used eminent domain to begin forcing people out of the town, and today there remains just three families and 5 total residents. As they die off or move out, their houses will be demolished as well. Other than those three houses, a church and the municipal building (the even have a fire department) there remains no other structures, just a network of roads, sidewalks, and fire hydrants with nothing else. They don't even have mail service anymore, nor does the state plow the roads there anymore.
The effect is unsettling. The whole place just feels....wrong. There used to be smoke rising up through the pavement, but that has dwindled as the fire has moved farther underground. There are some concerns that as the fire continues, it may one day reach another town and cause another Centralia (Girardville had a couple fires earlier this year, which turned out to be part of a coal mine fire called Girardville North II that the state has known has been burning for 19 years).
Leaving Centralia, I then set a course to Nicholson, Pennsylvania, home of the famous Tunkhannock Creek Viaduct, often just referred to as Tunkhannock Viaduct or Nicholson Viaduct. Constructed in 1915 by the DL&W, Tunkhannock Viaduct is the largest concrete railroad bridge in the world, at 2375 feet long, 34 feet wide, and 300 feet tall. And it's not just huge, it's a gorgeous structure as well.
Tunkhannock Viaduct is still in use by Norfolk Southern, as part of their Sunbury Line. After being built by DL&W, it then became Erie-Lackawanna, and then the D&H took control of it during the Conrail era. D&H was of course sold off by N&W to Guilford, then went bankrupt and was placed under NYS&W's directed operatorship, before being merged into CP and then being bought back by NS.
You'll need to log in to post.
