Last January, during the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, the Wheelman and I took a semi-short notice, drive like mad, trip to the Pittsburgh area. Our destination was the Fallston Flagstop north of Pittsburgh. This was our first venture west of Johnstown for serious railfan adventures and it turned out very nicely indeed. As it turns out, most of what we saw was within an hour drive of our base at the Fallston Flagstop.
The Wheelman was working in Wilkes-Barre, PA at the time so this trip wasn't as nutty as it might sound. I simply drove down on Thursday and took Friday off from work (which got "snowed out"
anyway). Unfortunately, our planning did not allow for 
our usual diversion to Altoona. Time was pretty tight for this mission since the Wheelman was actually working right up to the minute we left. In fact he was working when I got a call from him that one of the D&H units was leading a local and I could drive here and there to get ahead of it at the far (south) bridge of the old WBCR. It wasn't too long later that we bee-lined it to Fallston.
I can't recommend the Fallston Flagstop highly enough for what we were doing. We wanted to sample all the railroading in the region in a measly three nights and two days. The Fallston Flagstop is ideally situated for heading off in all directions with many roads radiating from the area. With Terry Stuart's guidance and the Wheelman's navigation abili
ties (and luck) we got a taste of most of the area's shortlines, regionals and class I's. The sampling of photos include mainly the regionals and local shortlines: Allegheny Valley, Union, Pittsburgh and Ohio Central (McKees Rocks), Wheeling and Lake Erie (Rook Yard). We caught those on the first or second day along with the Class I's that I've mainly left off here. The last place we went was Youngstown, via Newcastle. We did some fossil hunting in Newcastle after viewing the CSX yard and mainly found Ohio Central in Youngstown proper. On the way back to Fallston though we found the Youngstown and SouthEastern in North Lima, OH. Headed back home on Monday, we caught the elusive ones: Buffalo and Pittsburgh (Butler), Bessemer 
and Lake Erie (Butler), RJ Corman (Clearfield).Pittsburgh turned out to be a place I could return to many more times (already been back once, see August posts) and probably not run out of things to see and explore. There are still many regional pockets from Youngstown to Connellsville that need a good checking out. That means plenty more trips and plenty more research. Odds are, if the Fallston Flagstop is available, we'll be booking the room. Even if it isn't available, we'll probably drop by to visit Terry anyway and view the parade that goes by his porch every day.
BC
Check out the link for the Fallston Flagstop on the right side of the page!
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