One of the better resources I have come across to this end is the plethora of old post cards still around depicting many of these structures, some better than others.
Most of the postcards were found on EBay unless noted, other pictures, mostly the more recent ones, come from Google and/or Bing images -
credit given if the source is known.
Dates are in the picture name, x means the date is approximate. If they were available, and interesting, I included the back side of the postcards.
1901a and 1910b would be the same card, both sides.
If the picture was really, really bad, some of them have been cleaned up and/or repaired when I had the energy.
Since many of these stations are no longer around (railfans seem to prefer the term "extant", I'm not one of them! :-), this page is mostly for historical reference.
This page is mostly for historical reference, as MANY of these stations are not around anymore!
What's the difference between a station and a depot? Most people will say "nuttin", it's a matter of preference, although many will use depot for older buildings.
If you have a picture you would like to contribute, please see the bottom of the page for how to find me, credit is always given to contributing photographers. Allentown
CNJ Station
Many thanks to Jim Spears for the use of his picture.
LV Station
The former Lehigh Valley RR station, long gone... from postcards.
Check out my Altoona railfan
guide for more info and pictures.
Amtrak Station
ex PRR ALTO Tower
ALTO tower lasted as a tower until the summer of 2012. The picture on the right shows the tower with its name plate taken off after it
was decommissioned on the same day the PL signals were taken out of service and removed. More pix in the Altoona guide.
Sitting along a hikey-bikey trail, the line to Newtown has been a much discussed line for future development into a new commuter
line by SEPTA for something like the last 30 years. In November of 2016, SEPTA has apparently given in to the rich people and thrown in the hat.
"They" are going to let Newtown tear up
what remains of the rails, and turn the line into more hikey-bikey trails. Years from now, when the Millenials are asking themselves why they
are stuck in traffic to get downtown for their jobs, they can reflect back upon this moment in history
and be proud! :-)
I can't tell you anything about this station, because I cannot find any information on it, anywhere.... Maybe someone out
there knows? Found the postcard on EBay!
Below is my best guess where this station might have been, if so, most of what is pictured is long gone, and they superimposed the state capitol building in the background,
because it is way off to the left and could not have been seen in this view. I can't tell if what looks like a foundation is the remains of the station (inside the
red outline), or "recently" put there to contain whatever it is that they keep there.
ex PRR Harris Tower
The HARRIS tower in Harrisburg PA.
It opened (I believe) in June
2010, and is supposed to be open on
Saturdays between 10am and 4pm, but don't count on the hours if you are making a
trip specifically to see the tower, as I stopped by recently shortly after 3pm,
and it was already closed. It is just north of the Amtrak depot.
Also in the area is the Rockville bridge north of H'burg in Marysville, and
Enola yard, on the south side of I81 along US11.
A picture found on EBay of the depot that used to be in Mann's
Choice, southwest of the interchange of the Pennsy Turnpike and I-99 heading up
to Altoona.
Marysville is on the western bank of the Susquehanna River,
north of Harrisburg PA. The information is from a friend who prefers to
remain anonymous. But a BIG Thanks goes to him for detailing the photo and
providing the history!
A "stranded" depot. CSX (ex B&O) tracks
are behind on the fill. Dunno anything about it, but it sure would be a
great place for a model railroad club, and/or a live steam club!!!
Depot #2
This depot is located almost in the middle of the downtown area.
Depot #3
This depot is located in the downtown area, the front of which houses a photo studio.
New Castle is also home to the New Castle Industrial RR,
and Kasgro, which specializes in large capacity railroad cars. Several of
the old Westinghouse cars for carrying transformers can be seen in their yard.
The Nicholson Station was the first, and largest, station built by the
Liggett’s Gap Railroad on its line from Scranton, PA to Great Bend, PA in
1849/1850. Initially, the wood station was used to board transient workers
before being used to handle freight and passengers. As many as one hundred
workmen slept on the second floor of the station during construction. The north
section of the first floor, the freight room, was the big dining hall and the
south portion of the first floor was a kitchen, living room, and bedroom for
family.
The Liggett’s Gap Railroad was a predecessor to the Delaware, Lackawanna &
Western Railroad (DL&W), which was the one of the earliest railroads in the
region. Railroads were crucial in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century,
the Industrial Age of the United States, to changing how goods, people, and
services moved, especially by, literally, opening small rural communities like
Nicholson to the “rest of the world.” Railroads like the DL&W moved coal, iron
and steel out of Scranton through towns including Nicholson to where it was
needed outside the region. They fueled our nation’s economy.
Additionally, all along the DL&W from Scranton to Binghamton, stations to
receive milk were built at places most convenient to area dairy farmers. The
largest milk station was at Nicholson, just north of the Nicholson station. Milk
was then shipped on the lines to Scranton and Binghamton.
Nicholson was the most important stop between Scranton and Binghamton as it
sent and received more passengers and freight and brought more profit to the
DL&W than any other station along the line, and for some years it was more than
all the other stations combined. Reverend Garford Williams reported in the
January 15, 1954 edition of the Nicholson Examiner that “in 1854, the Nicholson
station received 3,459 passengers who paid $1,741.32 in fares from all DL&W
railroad points to Nicholson. The same year, Nicholson sent out 2,562 passengers
on the Lackawanna Railroad, who paid $1,778.79 in fares to all railroad points.”
It’s interesting to note that the 1880 U.S. Census records that there were 586
residents in Nicholson.
In 1855, the local Post Office moved from the edge of the settlement to the
station, at which time the name was changed from Baconville (sometimes also
referred to as Bacontown), after the town’s second Postmaster (Nathan Bacon), to
Nicholson, named after John Nicholson, the former comptroller general of the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1794 who greatly influenced our early
Nation. For some time, the station agent, Albert King, was also the postmaster.
For fifty years, the Nicholson station employed a passenger agent, a freight
agent, telegrapher, and several assistants.
Between the years 1870 and 1883, all trains had to be switched at the
Nicholson station; requiring a switch man to be on duty at all times day and
night. About this time there were five stage coach routes out of Nicholson that
made connections with the DL&W. Also, with Nicholson being the low spot on the
rail line, all trains out of Nicholson needed a push up and out of the town. The
“Nicholson Pusher” was a helper engine, with two engines added later, used to
push or pull long freight trains either way out of Nicholson. Because of this,
there was a turntable in Nicholson, with three siding tracks and one switch
track, all that were connected to the main line.
In May 1878, the first telephone service in the area was installed when
service was opened between the Nicholson and Scranton Stations, about 21 miles
south. The station was THE center of the community.
After the DL&W built the Cut-Off that was opened in 1915, the original wood
station only handled freight while passenger service was provided by the newly
built concrete station on the hill next to the also newly constructed largest
reinforced concrete bridge in the world, the Tunkhannock Viaduct, known as the
Nicholson Bridge to local residents. The old main line was eventually sold to
the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to become State Route 11. In 1941, Route 11 was
widened, and the ticket bay window and part of the roof on the Route 11 side
were removed.
The wood station continued to handle freight after the DL&W merger with the
Erie Railroad (becoming the Erie Lackawanna Railroad) in 1960. From the October
16, 1970, Nicholson Examiner article about the Nicholson station agent, it’s
stated that the station “is the last station between Scranton (PA) and
Binghamton (NY) to remain open.” This further illustrates the importance of the
Nicholson station not just to the community, but to the region as well.
Due to financial hardship, the Erie Lackawanna Railroad closed the station in
1971. The building was then sold in 1983 to a local business and in private use
until bought by the Nicholson Heritage Association in June 2012.
This station is now a restaurant, having been purchased from Conrail in 1981. They built one addition to the front
of the station, and another to the right, placing two ex Pennsy passenger
cars on the outside of the addition. The food is good and reasonable, and if you are in the area, you should make a point of stopping in
for lunch or dinner. Northumberland is about 50 miles north of Harrisburg and I81.
This depot has served the EBT - East Broad Top, for many, many
years, and we hope for many to come..... The foggy picture almost looks like it
could be in 1940.
Perdix, although I have driven through there many, many times, wasn't a familiar name until a friend sent out these pictures and I looked it up. Banks tower was
the first tower west of the Rockville Bridge (in blue) and Marysville. My friend states: "NC," of course, stood for Northern Central, as that's where the NC's
Baltimore-Sunbury main line crossed the PRR's Middle Division. It was constructed in 1912, and demolished in the late 1980s. (Originally the diamond had been at "HA" Hailey's Station, a
half mile to the east.) The pictures are from February 1978.
A SEPTA commuter rail station on the Paoli/Thorndale Line, with a 4-track
mainline out in front of it.
GPS Coordinates: 40.04956, -75.40380
On Strafford Ave, off Old Eagle School Rd.
From Wikipedia: From 1873 to 1883, the building served as the railway station for Wayne PA.
In 1883, the building was moved to its current location in Strafford, which was then called
Eagle. The name was changed to Strafford in 1887. The landmark building was constructed in
the "Eastlake" or "Stick" architectural style popular from 1855 to 1877. In 1911 the
Philadelphia and Western Railroad extended their Strafford Branch to the station which
lasted until 1956. The train station was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in 1984. Rumors that the station had originally been one of the buildings used
in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia are unfounded. SEPTA restored the
station between 1999 and 2002 after damage from a June, 1999 fire. Work included
restoring the historic station building as well as the outbound shelter.
I love trains, and I love signals. I am not an expert. My webpages reflect what I find on the topic of the page. This is something I have fun with while trying
to help others.
Please Note: Since the main focus of my two websites is railroad signals, the railfan guides are oriented towards the signal fan being able to locate them.
For those of you into the modeling aspect of our hobby, my indexa page has a list of almost everything railroad oriented
I can think of to provide you with at least a few pictures to help you detail your pike.
If this is a railfan page, every effort has been made to make sure that the information contained on this map and in this railfan guide is correct. Once in a while, an
error may creep in :-)
My philosophy: Pictures and maps are worth a thousand words, especially for railfanning. Text descriptions only get you so far, especially if you get lost or
disoriented. Take along good maps.... a GPS is OK to get somewhere, but maps are still better if you get lost! I belong to AAA, which allows you to get local maps
for free when you visit the local branches. ADC puts out a nice series of county maps for the Washington DC area, but their state maps do not have the railroads on
them. If you can find em, I like the National Geographic map book of the U.S..... good, clear, and concise graphics, and they do a really good job of showing you where
tourist type attractions are, although they too lack the railroads. Other notes about specific areas will show up on that page if known.
BTW, floobydust is a term I picked up 30-40 years ago from a National Semiconductor data book, and means miscellaneous and/or other stuff.
Aerial shots were taken from either Google Maps or Bing Maps as noted. Screen captures are made with Snagit,
a Techsmith product... a great tool if you have never used it!
Pictures and additional information is always needed if anyone feels inclined to take 'em, send 'em, and share 'em, or if you have something to add or correct.... credit is
always given! BE NICE!!! Contact info is here
Beware: If used as a source, ANYTHING from Wikipedia must be treated as being possibly being inaccurate, wrong, or not true.
From
Google Maps in 2017
picture
by Smallbones, from Wikipedia
