Tuesday, October 08, 2013

B&LE SD9s #834 & 832 s.b. at RX Tower, 1968

Received the following via email. 
Note: Albion is a small town in Northwest PA. 

With the permission of photographer Mike Schafer, here is a slide that he took of RX tower at the south end of Albion Yard in late 1968. He and his close railfanning buddy, the late Jim Boyd, were there from Chicago to witness ex-DM&IR SD9s #834 & 832 about to cross S. Main Street /  PA Route 18 with a southbound (right where CTC began, going southbound) on a main track that is now lone gone.

The tower didn't have long to go, either, when he lensed it.
Even if the tower weren't later razed by the B&LE, though, it surely would have been gone when this very spot was devastated on May 31, 1985 by an EF-4 tornado, which crossed the highway and tracks from left to right, here. The landmark 137-foot, 100,000-gallon Rogers Bros. truck trailer manufacturing plant water tower in the background remained standing after the '85 tornado, but was finally taken down on January 7, 2000.

Note the pear-shaped crossing warning bell on it's own mast, next to the tower; the wooden crossbuck; the oh-so-skinny chimney; the wooden crossing gates (and the tip of the pedestrian gate touching the sidewalk, next to the base of the bell mast), and the 'END CTC' board on the northbound signal mast.  A nice visit via the Wayback Machine to a spot that 45 autumns later does still see daily trains, but now doesn't look anything like this! About all you can still accurately say in late 2013 is that, "PA Rt. 18 crosses a main track, here, that carries orange and black, six-axle engines."