Wide Open #14825

The Story

The regularly scheduled high-speed Amtrak passenger train to Philadelphia on the mainline meets the Strasburg Railroad steam train at the junction of the two railroads. The electric passenger train went by in a flash…literally, gone in seconds because it was doing 100 mph or nothing flying through here! The engineer on the steam locomotive opened the left sidecock valve and let out a plume of white steam to help make the scene.

Besides tourists, the little Strasburg Railroad does indeed haul a little local freight and the two railroads interchange cars here. As far as I know, this is the only place where revenue freight moves under steam in the country.

This is a nice image to compare old and new railroading roughly one hundred years apart, widely apart. Here you can see the width of technology as it progressed from the heritage of smoky steam railroading to modern mainline railroading under the visual clutter of overhead catenary wires and support beams. That’s quite a contrast from old to new. Just to help convey being there to you, I offer this image as an interesting sidebar of the day rather than a fine art piece. It was interesting and a unique situation to witness, certainly something not seen or thought of every day.

You will make your destination on either one of these trains, but one is clearly the slow boat. I was able to get a fair image of this very fast split-second meeting but a little too slow with the shutter speed: everything in the image is sharp but for a very slight blur on the high-speed Amtrak train if you look closely enough.

Follow this link for more information about the Strasburg Railroad…

Location: near Strasburg, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks