Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Shady Gap Electric Railway

I acquired photographs of someone's 1975 vacation trip to Orbosonia, Pennsylvania, + the Rockhill Trolley Museum located there. The photographer would seem to have been more interested in the steam locomotives & passenger cars kept there1, as those are the abundance of the photos, but they did take these of an open-air car, numbered 1875.

This one's a little blurry but I like the sentiment.

Shade Gap RR - Rock Hill Furnace

I really like this one. The car's colors look good + I like the "car stop" sign at the upper left corner is a nice touch.

Orbisonia PA Sept 1975

Like lightbulbs? The back of this one reads "Carson filament bulbs - trolley car, Orbisonia, PA Sept '75."

Carson filament bulbs - trolley car, Orbisonia, PA Sept '75

The car was acquired from Rio De Janeiro by the museum in 1965, & has had extensive work (including a new paint job) done on it since.2

-d.d.


1 The steam locomotives, actually, are part of the nearby East Broad Top RR.
2 The Rockhill Museum's website's really nice. A particularly nice touch is the mini-essays regarding each of the trolleys in their collection. Take, for example, this bit about open cars such as No. 1875:
Open cars were very expensive for the transit companies to operate. Unless the climate was always warm, the transit company needed to have a second set of cars for the passengers to ride during the winter weather. Rainstorms were also a problem, although curtains that could be drawn provided some relief. The public still loved the open cars in the hot summer months. It was necessary to have a crew of two people to operate an open car, a motorman to run the car and a conductor to collect the fares. This was a dangerous job for the conductor as he walked along the side running boards to collect the fares as traffic in the busy streets flew by him. For these reasons the open cars were replaced by closed cars or semi-convertible cars.

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