Amtrak's Dark Secret

Here's something you may not know, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor is, occasionally, illuminated. The occasion being overnight Maintenance of Way (MOW) activity. It can be a great opportunity for photography. However, the right of way is lighted for track work, not cameras, so you still have to treat it as a low-light situation. To make matters even more challenging, you'll probably need a telephoto or zoom lens and since the aperture of most zooms narrows at the long end, it can be difficult to get a well lighted picture. On the positive side, because it's a work zone, trains often pass by at reduced speeds. It's a challenge worth considering. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, you can get some very satisfying photos.

'Ma & Pa' historical group to purchase land

Photo: MDRails

(Trains Magazine) MUDDY CREEK FORKS, Pa. – The Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society, which operates the Ma & Pa Railroad Heritage Village in southern York County, Pa., announced that it plans to buy 6.67 acres along it railroad right of way and has begun fund-raising. The closing on the purchase is planned for late April.
The property, at High Rock, is about half a mile north of society headquarters at Muddy Creek Forks. Craig Sansonetti, president of the society, told Trains there are three reasons the group wants this site. Continued

Aberdeen mayor promises continued city help with restoration of historic B&O station

(The Aegis) Aberdeen Mayor Patrick McGrady pledged this week that the city would continue to support the ongoing community project to restore the historic B&O Railroad station off West Bel Air Avenue.
"The City of Aberdeen wants to see it done as much as you do," McGrady told Bob Tarring, who is the head of an ad hoc citizen committee formed to oversee the restoration, as Tarring and his associates gave the mayor and City Council an update Monday.
Tarring, along with Rick Herbig, of the Historical Society of Harford County Board of Trustees, and Jon Livezey, treasurer for the Aberdeen Room Archives and Museum, provided the update during Monday's city council meeting. Continued

Forgotten US airship crash recalled 80 years later

 

(AP) History buffs will gather this week near the New Jersey coast to commemorate a major airship disaster.
No, not that one.
Newsreel footage and radio announcer Herbert Morrison's plaintive cry, "Oh, the humanity!" made the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station probably the best-known crash of an airship.
But just four years earlier, a U.S. Navy airship seemingly jinxed from the start and later celebrated in song crashed only about 40 miles away, claiming more than twice as many lives.
The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it plunging tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933. Continued

Secrets of Duffy’s Cut Yield to Shovel and Science

 

(NYTimes) They laid his bones in a bed of Bubble Wrap, with a care beyond what is normally given to fragile things. They double-boxed those bones and carried them last month to the United Parcel Service office on Spruce Street in Philadelphia. Then they printed out the address and paid the fee.
With that, the remains of a young man were soon soaring over the Atlantic Ocean that he had crossed once in a three-masted ship. His name is believed to have been John Ruddy, and he was being returned to the Ireland he had left as a strapping teenage laborer in 1832.
His voyage home is the latest turn in the tale of Duffy’s Cut, a wooded patch that is little more than a sylvan blur to those aboard commuter trains rocketing past. It is a mass grave, in fact: the uneasy resting place for dozens of Irish immigrants who died during a cholera epidemic, just weeks after coming to America, as an old song says, to work upon the railway. Continued

Photo by smallbones 

 

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum

 

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum at Lemmon Street is a historic site that celebrates the history of the immense Irish presence in Southwest Baltimore City in the late 1840's. The museum officially opened on June 17th, 2002. This site consists of a group of 5 alley houses where the Irish immigrants who worked for the adjoining B&O Railroad lived. Two of the houses, 918 and 920 Lemmon St., are the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum. The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum are the centerpiece of a larger historical district that includes the B&O Railroad Museum, St. Peter the Apostle Church, the Hollins Street Market, and St. Peter the Apostle Cemetery. The museum is a project of the Railroad Historical District Corporation, a non-profit organization. Continued 

Ollie the Flying Cow

(Wikipedia) Elm Farm Ollie (known as "Nellie Jay" and post-flight as "Sky Queen") was the first cow to fly in an airplane, doing so on 18 February 1930, as part of the International Air Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. On the same trip, which covered 72 miles from Bismarck, Missouri, to St. Louis, she also became the first cow milked in flight. This was done ostensibly to allow scientists to observe midair effects on animals, as well as for publicity purposes. A St. Louis newspaper trumpeted her mission as being "to blaze a trail for the transportation of livestock by air." Continued 

 

Ma & Pa Railroad artifacts, photos, documents sought by preservation group

 

(Aegis) A new effort is under way to preserve the history of the iconic Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad that ran through the heart of Harford County more than 50 years ago.
A group responsible for the annual Maryland & Pennsylvania Month celebration in Delta, Pa., has begun a drive to locate, acquire, authenticate, preserve and display material relating to the Ma & Pa Railroad and its predecessors.
"So much material relating to the railroad's history has already been lost that steps must be taken to prevent further losses," Jerome Murphy, a Fork resident who is a member of the group and a collector of Ma & Pa photographs and documents, said. Continued

York's Civil War-era train closer to completion

(YDR) A sign hangs on a former feed store along the Northern Central Railway tracks in New Freedom, announcing the home of "Steam Into History." Renovations have been under way in the building at 2 W. Main St. as the nonprofit gears up to start a train excursion in June that will take travelers back in time to the Civil War era. The opening is scheduled to be in time for the 150th anniversary of the Confederate invasion of York in late June and the Battle of Gettysburg in early July. Continued

Tragedy at Chase

(Wikipedia) The Maryland train collision occurred at 1:04 pm on January 4, 1987, on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor main line in the Chase community of Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, at Gunpow Interlocking, about 18 miles northeast of Baltimore. Amtrak Train 94, the Colonial, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, crashed into a set of Conrail locomotives running light which had fouled the mainline. Train 94's speed at the time of the collision was estimated at about 108 miles per hour. Fourteen passengers on the Amtrak train were killed, as well as the Amtrak engineer and lounge car attendant. Continued

Photo: Freight Train, Chase, Maryland (MDRails)

Glenn L Martin

Martin TA-4J Skyhawk

(Martin Museum) Glenn Luther Martin (January 17, 1886 - December 5, 1955). At the time he taught himself to fly in 1909 and 1910, Glenn Luther Martin was a youthful businessman, the owner (at age 22) of Ford and Maxwell dealerships in Santa Ana, California. Although he had taken courses at Kansas Wesleyan Business College before his family moved west in 1905, Martin lacked a technical background. His first planes were built in collaboration with mechanics from his auto shop, working in a disused church building that Martin rented. In 1909 Martin made his first successful flight; by 1911 he numbered among the most famous of the "pioneer birdmen." Continued

Clement Studebaker

 

(Wikipedia) Clement Studebaker (March 12, 1831 – November 27, 1901) was an American carriage manufacturer. With his brothers, he founded H & C Studebaker Company, which built Pennsylvania-German conestoga wagons and carriages during his lifetime, and automobiles after his death, in South Bend, Indiana.
Clement Studebaker was born on March 12, 1831, in Pinetown, Pennsylvania. By the age of 14 he had learned to work as a blacksmith in his father's shop. He later worked as a teacher. Continued

Photo: Conestoga Wagon (1883) by Newbold Hough Trotter (1827-1898). Painting in the State Museum of Pennsylvania (AdMeskens)

 

1940: First flight of the Martin B-26 Marauder

(Wikipedia) The Martin B-26 Marauder was a World War II twin-engine medium bomber built by the Glenn L. Martin Company.
The first US medium bomber used in the Pacific Theater in early 1942, it was also used in the Mediterranean Theater and in Western Europe. The plane distinguished itself as "the chief bombardment weapon on the Western Front" according to an United States Army Air Forces dispatch from 1946, and later variants maintained the lowest loss record of any combat aircraft during World War II. Its late-war loss record stands in sharp contrast to its unofficial nickname "The Widowmaker" — earned due to early models' high rate of accidents during takeoff.
A total of 5,288 were produced between February 1941 and March 1945; 522 of these were flown by the Royal Air Force and the South African Air Force. Continued 

 

Nov. 24, 1903: Starting Your Car Gets a Bit Easier

1903 (Wired): Clyde J. Coleman is issued a patent for an electric automobile starter.
Coleman originally applied for the patent in 1899, but his early designs proved impractical. The need for this kind of starter for an internal combustion engine was obvious. Automobiles were getting larger, and hand-cranking — the method used to get the pistons moving in order to make ignition possible — was not only cumbersome, but physically demanding and potentially injurious. Continued

Photo: Ben Shahn FSA/OWI/LoC

 

Henry Bourne Joy

(Wikipedia) Henry Bourne Joy (November 23, 1864 – November 6, 1936) was President of the Packard Motor Car Company, and a major developer of automotive activities as well as being a social activist.
In 1913, Joy and Carl Graham Fisher were driving forces as principal organizers of the Lincoln Highway Association, a group dedicated to building a concrete road from New York to San Francisco. After the first several years, Fisher had become more involved instead with creation of the north-south Dixie Highway project and became a developer of Miami Beach, but Joy was dedicated to the Lincoln Highway for the long-haul. Naming it after former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was one of the moves Joy led, and his Lincoln Highway project was completed in his lifetime, despite lack of financial support by automotive leaders such as Henry Ford (Sr.). Continued 

 

Stewartstown Railroad line abandoned by federal board

 

(YDR) A federal board ruled Friday that it has granted the abandonment of the 7.4-mile line of the 127-year-old Stewartstown Railroad.
The estate of George M. Hart had asked the Federal Surface Transportation Board to declare the railroad abandoned. It's a step the estate needed to take so that it can foreclose on the railroad to collect a $350,000 debt the railroad owed to Hart.
The federal board ruled that the record does not show a credible need to keep the line in the national rail transportation system, the ruling states. The Stewartstown Railroad Company is unlikely to restore rail service on the line. Continued

Charles Carroll of Carrollton

(Wikipedia) Charles Carroll of Carrollton (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832) was a wealthy Maryland planter and an early advocate of independence from Great Britain. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and later as United States Senator for Maryland. He was the only Catholic and the longest-lived (and last surviving) signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95. Continued

Image: Cornerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad laid by Carroll on July 4, 1828, now displayed at the B&O Railroad Museum.

 

Pennsylvania Turnpike

(Wikipedia) ... When the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940, it was the first long-distance rural highway in the United States and was popularly known as the "tunnel highway" because of the seven mountain tunnels along its route.
The turnpike was partially constructed on an unused railroad grade constructed for the aborted South Pennsylvania Railroad project, and six of its seven original tunnels (all tunnels with the exception of the Allegheny Mountain tunnel) were first bored for that railroad.
Proposals to use the grade and tunnels for a toll road were made starting in late 1934. The road would bypass the steep grades on Pennsylvania's existing major east-west highways – US 22 (William Penn Highway) and US 30 (Lincoln Highway) – and offer a high-speed four lane route free of cross traffic. Continued 

Photo: Library of Congress 

Efforts to preserve Stewartstown Railroad focus on fund raising

(YDR) Friends of the Stewartstown Railroad, an independent group, is pursuing its fund raising effort that began in 2009.
More recently, the railroad company has expanded that effort to PayPal, in its efforts to use the magic of the Internet to save the 128-year-old railroad.
In addition, a group is being formed to loan money to the railroad, loans that would be secured by its assets. The idea would be to allow the company at least five years to begin showing a profit. Continued

Maryland House's historic art to be preserved, but won't return

(Aegis) The Maryland House on I-95 near Aberdeen may be known more for its fast food and bevy of bathrooms than for fine artwork, but its murals portraying Maryland history, that have adorned the travel plaza for more than 40 years, have a significant history of their own.
When the Maryland House went into what will be at least a one-year hibernation this past weekend, so did the mural pieces done by artist William A. Smith that depict significant events in Maryland's history and have long hung around the building.
The Maryland Transportation Authority says it is working to ensure the mural panels will survive the plaza's demolition and reconstruction. They will not, however, be a part of the new Maryland House. Continued