BaltACDwitness the steel mills light shows as the train followed the river from Pittburgh to McKeesport; our return trip from Baltimore would be on #9 arriving in the evening and witnessing the light show.
When I was a kid we traveled a lot between Dallas and New Orleans. The oil refineries at night were quite a show. I loved seeing them.
Best light show from a steel mill is when slag is being dumped. Before Wisconsin Steel Works was shut down in 1980, about a dozen slag thimbles would be periodically shoved by a CWP switcher to the dumping hill just north of 104th Street. There were some spots on the street where you could see the molten slag flowing with the sky well lit. The neighborhood just east of the hill was known as Slag Valley.
Backshop MidlandMike Not really a photo location, but I always was impressed by the view of the ex-B&LE bridge over the Allegheny from the parallel Penn Turnpike bridge. The first time that I went to Pittsburgh when I was about 12, I saw a SB ore train with 3 SD38s on the bridge. I've been there many times in the past almost 50 years and I've never seen another. Must've been beginners luck.
MidlandMike Not really a photo location, but I always was impressed by the view of the ex-B&LE bridge over the Allegheny from the parallel Penn Turnpike bridge.
Not really a photo location, but I always was impressed by the view of the ex-B&LE bridge over the Allegheny from the parallel Penn Turnpike bridge.
The first time that I went to Pittsburgh when I was about 12, I saw a SB ore train with 3 SD38s on the bridge. I've been there many times in the past almost 50 years and I've never seen another. Must've been beginners luck.
I'm a Western Pennsylvania kid. My mom is from the area and I have family up and down the Allegheny River valley. We moved back to Pennsylvania when I was 4 and I lived there from 1986 to 2010, aside from four years in Erie and State College. My memories go back far enough to have seen a high hood Conrail unit on the now gone Butler Branch and saw B&LE F7s on a late season ore train (must have been 1988 or 1989).
I've been past that bridge hundreds of times. Never seen a train on it. It is my White Whale.
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