Pennsylvania Railroad in present day.

[KriegslokBR52]

Continuing on the Pennsy mainline from earlier this year, June 8, 2025. After Glen Loch interlocking i stopped over in Downingtown. Here the "Standard Railroad of the World" put another twist in their "standard" 11KV catenary system.

That's right, single huge mast with a bracket spanning all tracks (there used to be 4 electrified tracks here). View is looking east towards Philadelphia.

Milepost 31 is from the old Broad Street station in Philly, which doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced in 1950s by an underground facility. View looking west and besides another Pennsy electrified track, there was also a parallel Reading Railroad branch to the right where the greenery is:

Next stop was Thorndale at MP35. Thorndale was a helper station back in steam days and even into early 1960s. A small locomotive service facility is still standing:

The rusty and in my opinion more interesting side is facing south away from the road.

Shitter is open if anyone needs it:

 

[Rico]

Great modeling pics, thanx!

Oh… and that pooper still looks better than some of the truck stops I’ve been to, yikes!

 

[KriegslokBR52]

Oh… and that pooper still looks better than some of the truck stops I’ve been too, yikes!

Yepper, one wonders how does someone manage to on a wall, three feet off the floor.

 

[KriegslokBR52]

A few more from Thorndale:

The big concrete wall is actually the sand bin. Thorndale back before electrification was the site of a huge coaling warf, spanning all tracks at perpendicular direction and having a track on top for the coal hoppers to deliver coal directly into the coal bins. Not much has been left of that coal warf, except a piece of retaining wall build from cut stone just west of that sand house. Backtracking just a bit east, six tracks left Thorndale, 4 on the mainline and 2 for the so called "Philadelphia and Thorndale" branch. P&T gained elevation until it curved over eastbound tracks of the mainline:

A "Keystone" eastbound to New York is heading on track number 1;

We are at Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg to see PRRs finest:

The closer one is M1b, while K4 is sitting back. Tender for M1b:

 

[ctclibby]

A few more from Thorndale:View attachment 247416View attachment 247418View attachment 247419View attachment 247421
The big concrete wall is actually the sand bin. Thorndale back before electrification was the site of a huge coaling warf, spanning all tracks at perpendicular direction and having a track on top for the coal hoppers to deliver coal directly into the coal bins. Not much has been left of that coal warf, except a piece of retaining wall build from cut stone just west of that sand house. Backtracking just a bit east, six tracks left Thorndale, 4 on the mainline and 2 for the so called "Philadelphia and Thorndale" branch. P&T gained elevation until it curved over eastbound tracks of the mainline:View attachment 247423View attachment 247422
A "Keystone" eastbound to New York is heading on track number 1;View attachment 247415
We are at Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg to see PRRs finest:View attachment 247420
The closer one is M1b, while K4 is sitting back. Tender for M1b:View attachment 247424

Gotta love those dog house tenders....

L8r

 

[rgeiter]

Rico wrote:
"I've never seen one right on top of a switch before"

Looks like the track underneath the signal bridge has since been "re-configured", long after the signal system on the Bald Eagle was shut down.

I recall reading that the Bald Eagle Branch was where the PRR first experimented with cab signals back in the 1920's. I'll guess that the signal bridges remaining there (but no longer in use) date from around that time.

You beat me to it.

 

[KriegslokBR52]

Blast from the past. Back in late 1970s, Conrail was playing with the idea of electrifying their mainline through Pennsylvania from Harrisburg/Enola, to west of Pittsburgh to their Conway yard. The idea was not new. Pennsylvania railroad was in fact studying the subject early on with their electrification. They even came up with a powerful freight electric locomotive in 1917; classified FF1, nicknamed "Big Liz" by the railroaders. They have again tackled the studies right after the second World War, but do to their bad financial state they let the idea sleep. In 1976 we had a new master over former Pennsy lines: Conrail. Two new experimental electric locomotives showed up; GM6C and GM10B. To clear everything up before we get to our subject matter, the GM6C was in fact built in 1975, and delivered to Penn Central for testing. GM10B came late in 1976 when Conrail was already functioning. What many fans are not familiar with, was a third experimental electric unit on Conrail. Here the story gets a little complicated; Conrail had ended their electric operations in early 1981. But probably late in 1979, one of their E44 class electrics, was sent to General Electric for rebuilding; this was E44a 4453. Not much has been written about this particular experiment other than that it was delivered after rebuilding to Conrail in 1983 for testing. Unit featured new choper control and an upgrade to 6000 HP rating. Supposedly it was a test unit for the new E60 electric locomotives being built for National Railway of Mexico (N de M). Number 4453 spent the rest of 1983 and early 1984 in service on the Northeast Corridor, hauling generally TV trains between Kearny yard in New Jersey and the Potomac yard in Alexandria, Virginia. There are few pictures of it in rebuilt form on the Internet, so i'll just put a link to one of the sites: https://share.google/images/1cTvoEbueyLXXo2To
Pictures of this particular E44a are rare and to find one other than what is on the Internet, is a great find:

I found this one on a train show after digging through several picture piles. Unfortunately the front is cut off and i don't know where the picture was taken. It shows the unit with some road grime, so i'm assuming it might be traveling back to General Electric in a freight consist. There's also no sign of catenary anywhere, so this might be also in, or near Erie, Pennsylvania, where the unit was built. The unit sat at General Electric plant until summer 1994, when General Electric decided to have a "house cleaning" and sent the locomotive to scrap yard.

 

[Bruette]

Pictures of this particular E44 are rare and to find one other than what is on the Internet, is a great find

Thanks, Mack, and I appreciate all the details, it was definitely an interesting read!

 

[Bruette]

 

[Bruette]

Pennsylvania Railroad's L1s Mikado steam freight locomotive No. 520. Built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1916 and retired in 1957, No. 520 is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is part of the Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Collection. No. 520 is currently undergoing stabilization work to prepare it to be one of six historic locomotives exhibited in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania’s roundhouse, which is now being constructed.

Historian Ronald T. Bailey recently wrote about the development of the L1s Lollipops in the first of his two-part article in the Friends of the Railroad Museum’s Milepost magazine. https://www.rrmuseumpa.org/