Charles Kadyk who now lives in Mohnton, PA (near Reading) kindly hosted me for a bit of railfanning this past Friday. We chose the former Reading RR (now NS) west of the city of Reading, as NS was running their full schedule and I had never seen that part of the railroad. It’s essentially the funnel between Harrisburg and New York, and connects the former PRR MIDDLE DIVISION mainline as well as RDG Hagerstown gateway to the south with Allentown and NY/NJ, and Philadelphia. Multiple track and rolling country, so trains are frequent and fast. I think the longest we waited between trains may have been 30 minutes. Plenty of signals and crew chatter so its easy to know when trains are nearby. East of the Reading area, suburban sprawl has drained the area of much of its character and clutters most views, but from Reading west the feel of the region is still very much present, there's still some RDG atmosphere, and the landscape around the railroad less cluttered.
We started out at Wyomissing Jct, which is where the lines from Philadelphia and from Allentown both converge on the west side of town. There's signals, as well as a stiff westbound grade coming out of the Schuylkill valley there. After a brief wait we nailed a hard working westbound work extra behind an unorthodox combination of SD 40-2 and MP-15, and including some “vintage” well used N&W and Southern rolling stock:
We moved a few miles west to Sinking Spring, a town with many grade crossings (so a nice place to listen to horn music), branch junction, and an ethanol plant. No sooner than we arrived than an eastbound Enola>Allentown transfer job slammed by, with some garden variety road power
The most colorful lash up of the day was this empty oil can heading west with an SD-70 leading some BNSF power including a warbonnet
another eastbound, a double stack from NC headed for NJ
there were also some interesting line side structures such as this very modelgenic, smallish grain dealer (and active rail customer):
and the freshly restored Wernersville depot and freight station (the platform
sheds still need some TLC)
1 comment:
Good stuff! (as usual) Charles does know his way around those parts.
I edited the font color to show up with the black background, so if you do any new editing some words are in white so they appear to be missing. That's the only way I could get them to show up without delving into code, which I don't really know.
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