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[vvtdeb]

...Most trains don't have an Official STOP at Lock Haven, although they will INTERCHANGE traffic at the Lock Havwen yards for the Bald Eagle as you duely noted.  Trains on the Harrisburg Division  are usually bound for RENOVO, PA as THAT was and STILL is the Division boundry POINT for anything bound west of Lock Haven from points South and East.  Until just recently it was around 5 trains a day plus or minus, but because of recent diversions of traffic over another short line that the NS just happened to have (also) recently purchased controlling STOCK in, the train frequency is down to one or two trains.  They just hired two more conductors home based in Renovo this YEAR 2006.   

[Modelcar]

....Ah yes...that looks familiar......Nice Pic, AJ....and the mountain range would be on your right stretched all along the valley all the way to Lock Haven...Beautiful valley. Problem the times I traveled up that valley I saw very few trains....But years ago, years ago....traveling from L H north west to Renova and Emporium I remember stopping and taking pic's of steam engines pulling coal trains as we crossed the railroad on a bridge....Remembering it was probably an MI....believe that's what they were called...Had large air tank on front of the engine....Still have those photos around here someplace.

[Modelcar]

AJ....You mention of the N & B E railroad being rather straight up through that valley such as near Port Matilda...True and of course it's because of such a nice {and beautiful}, valley all the way up through there to Lock Haven...Always liked that trip up through there....very scenic. And of course the railroad being in view so much.
On the Piper plant....had a chance another time when production lines were running in the plant and got to visit all floors of the operation....Uncle and Aunt both worked there.
Another interesting location there in town is over at the edge {Lock Haven side}, of the Susquehanna river you can find where the old Locks were built and the canal cut right across town...I imagine parts of that can still be seen.....The location is between the bridge {in center of town and the one in the direction of the airport....

[ajmiller]

Here's a shot I took while chasing a loaded PP&L train north on old US 220 between Julian and Unionville. You can see just how close the track is to the highway.

It took me about three and a half minutes to pass the train and I was probably going about 60mph.

Imagine driving this road at night with a train coming toward you. You would see headlights directly in front of you. The train would roar by on your right side at a relative speed of 100 mph.

[spbed]

Terrific pix's![:o)][:)]

QUOTE: Originally posted by ajmiller

QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar
Your circus train photo sure shows up with a full page display...Great. If you took this photo you must be familiar with the location....What's the story on the non straight track in the distance...Even looks like the track the train is on makes a bend in the distance...All on ROW that appears like the track should be straight down through the distance.

The picture was taken yesterday morning (2005-04-18) as the Ringling circus red train departed Lock Haven Pa. I had followed it from Bellefonte Pa to Lock Haven on the Nittany & Bald Eagle. The circus was here in State College over the past weekend. The view is toward the west, and I was standing on the abandoned ROW of the Beech Creek line of the NYC. The Beech Creek was higher in elevation here and gave a good view of the NS Buffalo line (former PRR) from Lock Haven.

The tracks do bend around a floodgate in a levee that protects Lock Haven. You can see the right door of the floodgate. It looks like a greenish grey box just above and to the left of the signal head. I think the right track is the main line, and the left track is a passing track/yard lead. There's a small yard at Lock Haven where NS interchanges with the Nittany & Bald Eagle.

Here's a closer look at the floodgates. You should also be able to see the Nittany engines behind the NS engines in the yard.


Lock Haven is situated between the west branch of the Susquehanna River and the Bald Eagle Creek and is susceptible to flooding, so some years ago they built levees along the river bank and creek to provide flood control. Bald Eagle Creek is really about the width of a small river at this point as it joins the Susquehanna just east of Lock Haven. Last fall because of the rain from hurricane Ivan, there was a lot of flood damage all over Pa., but Lock Haven did pretty well.

In the previous pic, you can see the RR bridge over Bald Eagle Creek under the livestock cars just behind the engines.

[ajmiller]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar
Got to visit the Piper plant years ago when it was badly damaged by floods....I'm thinking that might have been back in 54' or 55' but not sure but the water got into the plant's first floor and ruined many planes on the assembly line and they all had to be scrapped...etc...

I think today, the Piper plant is just a museum. I haven't ever gone in there.

QUOTE:
I had forgotten about the flood control doors located at various places. Question: Hasn't that ex. Pennsylvania route that goes I believe up to Buffalo...hasn't that been downgraded to local traffic only or has that come back to life...? Seems in my memory that was a double track line....

I believe it is single track today. I don't know how many trains use it each day, but I don't think it's too many. The busiest part of the line in Pa. is Harrisburg-Lock Haven. I haven't been too lucky rail fanning in Lock Haven. The best bet is to try to find Nittany & Bald Eagle or other North Shore system action, but I don't think they operate on weekends. I really need to get a scanner to do any serious train finding up there.

North of Lock Haven, the Buffalo line is really remote. The line interchanges with RJ Corman at Keating, so I know there is substantial eastbound coal traffic on the line, and the line also connects to Buffalo & Pittsburgh (BPRR) on the ex-Pittsburg & Shawmut (PSR) line at Driftwood. There was also a connection at Emporium with the Allegheny & Eastern (ALY), and the SPV map shows that NS had trackage rights on this line to Erie. Genesee & Wyoming is the owner of the BPRR, PSR and ALY, and the last time I checked their website, the PSR and ALY have been merged into the BPRR and the system map no longer shows a connection at Emporium. The ALY line was PRR's line to Erie and was part of the Philadelphia & Erie. South of Emporium the Philadelphia & Erie is today's NS Buffalo line. I've never been to Emporium, but I have driven from Lock Haven to DuBois through Renovo and Driftwood. The roads are very narrow and winding.

I think a lot of the north-south NS traffic from Buffalo is now routed down the D&H line between Binghampton NY and Scranton PA. At Scranton, trains could either follow the Lehigh line to Allentown, or the D&H from Scranton to Sunbury. The D&H line between Binghampton and Scranton is the former Lackawanna line that goes over Tunkhannock Viaduct. The original D&H line is mostly a bike trail.

QUOTE:
On our trip up to Lock Haven from Somerset, Co...we'd travel along old 220 and the Nittany and Bald Eagle would parallel along that road for quite a ways and marveled at the still present Pennsylvania type signals still in place......

Yeah, the line is practically on top of old 220 for several miles between Unionville and Port Matilda. NS has trackage rights on the Nittany between Tyrone and Lock Haven, and they run unit coal trains on it several times a week I think. Conrail helped to have the track upgraded with CWR on much of the line back in the 90's to get the track speed up to 40mph. It's got to be one of the straightest routes in the whole state, and trains can fly like the wind on that line, or so it seems when driving along side a 100 car coal train.

I was driving north on old 220 at night once, with the track to my right and on this night, I saw the headlights of a train coming straight at me. Scary as heck because of how close the road was to the track at that place where it passed me. I was probably going 60mph and with an empty coal train going 40mph in the opposite direction only a few feet to my right.

[Modelcar]

AJ....Thanks for the great layout and description of process regarding posting photos, etc....I'll take some time and soak that in.
Now...on your latest picture....First of all it is great. And now I know what is happening and somewhat where you are located. Lock Haven has been a place we visited for over 50 years....In fact when we made our first visit to the city of lock Haven we were driving an almost new 49' Chevrolet, so it's been a few years.
Had an Aunt and Uncle living there we visited so have been there quite a few times over the years. I'm very familiar with the flooding problems they have had and knew they have taken some steps to overcome the worst of it. Even building some buildings on "stilts"...and just car parking under them, etc....
Got to visit the Piper plant years ago when it was badly damaged by floods....I'm thinking that might have been back in 54' or 55' but not sure but the water got into the plant's first floor and ruined many planes on the assembly line and they all had to be scrapped...etc...

I had forgotten about the flood control doors located at various places. Question: Hasn't that ex. Pennsylvania route that goes I believe up to Buffalo...hasn't that been downgraded to local traffic only or has that come back to life...? Seems in my memory that was a double track line....
I was over at the Lock Haven airport years ago when they were testing the then prototype Piper Tri Pacer and the day I was watching they were field testing it's landing gear doing all kinds of landings etc....
Saw the Friedom Train there when it was traveling around the country.....Believe that one was being pulled by engine #201..{could be wrong on that, I'm relying on memory}....
On our trip up to Lock Haven from Somerset, Co...we'd travel along old 220 and the Nittany and Bald Eagle would parallel along that road for quite a ways and marveled at the still present Pennsylvania type signals still in place......
Anyway, enjoyed both of your photos and even more so now that I know where it is....

[ajmiller]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar
Your circus train photo sure shows up with a full page display...Great. If you took this photo you must be familiar with the location....What's the story on the non straight track in the distance...Even looks like the track the train is on makes a bend in the distance...All on ROW that appears like the track should be straight down through the distance.

The picture was taken yesterday morning (2005-04-18) as the Ringling circus red train departed Lock Haven Pa. I had followed it from Bellefonte Pa to Lock Haven on the Nittany & Bald Eagle. The circus was here in State College over the past weekend. The view is toward the west, and I was standing on the abandoned ROW of the Beech Creek line of the NYC. The Beech Creek was higher in elevation here and gave a good view of the NS Buffalo line (former PRR) from Lock Haven.

The tracks do bend around a floodgate in a levee that protects Lock Haven. You can see the right door of the floodgate. It looks like a greenish grey box just above and to the left of the signal head. I think the right track is the main line, and the left track is a passing track/yard lead. There's a small yard at Lock Haven where NS interchanges with the Nittany & Bald Eagle.

Here's a closer look at the floodgates. You should also be able to see the Nittany engines behind the NS engines in the yard.


Lock Haven is situated between the west branch of the Susquehanna River and the Bald Eagle Creek and is susceptible to flooding, so some years ago they built levees along the river bank and creek to provide flood control. Bald Eagle Creek is really about the width of a small river at this point as it joins the Susquehanna just east of Lock Haven. Last fall because of the rain from hurricane Ivan, there was a lot of flood damage all over Pa., but Lock Haven did pretty well.

In the previous pic, you can see the RR bridge over Bald Eagle Creek under the livestock cars just behind the engines.

[ajmiller]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar

Thanks AJ......just one thing....confused with the line..."remembering to remove the spaces in the forum code".....

I stuck a space between the square bracket [ and the code img in the example. The reason is that if I type it without the space, the forum will interpret it and try to insert HTML in its place.

Web pages are made of of code called HTML which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. This fancy name means that the source text of the page is mixed with code called Markup Tags which, for example, look like this: <B>Text to be made boldface</B>. The text between <B> and </B> will appear in boldface when displayed by a web browser and the <B> and </B> tags themselves will be hidden. The markup tags contain formatting information so that the browser knows how to display the content.

In HTML an image is inserted using the <IMG> tag and it looks something like this:
<IMG SRC="http://www.esm.psu.edu/~ajmiller/circustrain.jpg">. The text following the code SRC= is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the image file, which tells the browser to download the file circustrain.jpg from the webserver www.esm.psu.edu. The browser displays the image and hides the code in the <IMG> tag.

So what does the forum server do? It has to send HTML code to your web browser, so it takes the posts which are mostly plain text and combines them with HTML and sends that to your browser when you view a trains.com web page.

To get special formatting of text, the forum allows you to place formatting codes that are delimited by square brackets [ and ]. The forum code is similar to HTML in concept, except it is greatly simplified. To get boldface text in forum code you would type [ b ] text in bold [ /b ] and the forum will then convert these codes to proper HTML. Now about the spaces. I said [ b ] text in bold [ /b ] would cause bold face, except what you should see is text in bold. The problem is that the forum doesn't provide a way to tell it not to interpret the forum codes. So to make the codes work properly, remove the spaces between the '[' and 'b' and ']'.

As Larry tried to show, the forum code looks like {b}text in bold{/b} except replace curly braces { and } with corresponding square brackets [ and ].
To insert an image you would type something like {img}http://your.webserver.com/your_folder/your_picture.jpg{/img} but replace curly braces with corresponding square brackets.

Hopefully this doesn't add more confusion.

[Modelcar]

Thanks AJ......just one thing....confused with the line..."remembering to remove the spaces in the forum code".....
Your circus train photo sure shows up with a full page display...Great. If you took this photo you must be familiar with the location....What's the story on the non straight track in the distance...Even looks like the track the train is on makes a bend in the distance...All on ROW that appears like the track should be straight down through the distance.

[ajmiller]

Modelcar,
you seem to be wishing that trains.com would allow users to upload photos to the forum and their servers would then host the photos. Serving photos can use a lot of network bandwidth and storage space if the files are large, and perhaps trains.com decided they didn't want run a picture post.

So far as I can tell, the only way to display photos here is to put them on some other publicly accessible web site and put links to the photo within the forum [ img ] code.

For example [ img ] http://www.esm.psu.edu/~ajmiller/trainpics/circustrain.jpg [ /img ] will cause the post to contain a reference to the picture circustrain.jpg that I have on my department's web server. To make the code work, the spaces between the square brackets and the code 'img' must be removed.

Personally, I prefer URLs instead of trying to embed the photo in the post. I have a slow connection and I don't like lots of pictures loading automatically. If someone just posts the URL, I can click on it if I want to see it. It really bugs me when people have large images showing up in their signatures.

Anyway, if you must embed, here goes, [ img ] http://www.esm.psu.edu/~ajmiller/trainpics/circustrain.jpg [ /img ] remembering to remove the spaces in the forum code:


Each time someone views this post, the image is not being downloaded from trains.com, but rather is downloaded directly from my department's server www.esm.psu.edu to the viewer's browser.

[Modelcar]

Tree....I'm sure anyone with..as you say, programing experience and the forum Code listings and all the way through the itinerary of the process is easy for someone that is literate in these computer processes...it's easy to figure what is required...But for many others on here {and I include myself in the group}, that keep asking "how" and "what to do" to get a photo posted with their post....it may be never, never land. Yes, I can "through this computer around" easy enough to dig up info and communicate where necessary and play with my photos, etc., etc....but the above simply makes installing photos a bit cumbersome at best....for us novice folks. That's all I'm saying.

[spbed]

Sorry like others got a error message. [;)][;)]

Originally posted by drmadotis
[

Living nearby to MP 186 of the UPRR  Austin TX Sub

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