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Elm Street was a terminal in the days of steam operation. Some steam trains continued to the Norristown state hospital, while others went all the way to Lansdale. Those services ended when the electrification to Elm Street opened in 1936. At that time. the population between Elm Street and Lansdale ...

[/quote] I still believe that Reading should have passenger rail service to Philadelphia and Valley Forge (in fact, I find it to be ridiculous that no such service exists for this city). However, this whole discussion of extending the line to Reading or nothing at all is disheartening. A phased appr...

Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania aren't Greater New York City, and that's why those easy New York analogies seen so frequently in this forum don't work. When I was one of the volunteers surveying passengers on the Reading line for PennDOT in the 1970s, we witnessed the ridership patterns and li...

Why do some us us in the dismissed DVRPC Regional Citizens Committee want to corral the 40-plus mile RRD Reading extension? Because we recognize more important goals than "maximum rail" or uncritically restoring past glory. We want to minimize the sprawl that further exurban highway-buildi...

As for routes that Amtrak physically created, the best known one was the (14 miles?) Post Road-Renssalaer track reconstruction (earlier abandoned) that again allowed direct movement between Boston and the Albany-Renssalaer station. Later lines created by or for Amtrak would include short new trackag...

We need a generic HO rail-motor car/gas-electric car. Both Walthers and Spectrum missed the bet by coming out with a single-end Electro Motive vehicle with cab and working coupler at only one end. They require a loop, wye, or turntable at each end of any run. Maybe that's why they haven't sold well....

Berks Street Yard was the RDG's terminal yard for Philly-Bethlehem through freight service, traditionally two round trips.

I (and others) used to think the the New York Short Line would be a great addition to the commuter network; but now we see that there are other uses for it which are more important, namely restoring and increasing long-distance freight service up and down the CSX "I-95 corridor" and also g...

Parking space for about 1000 cars has been identified around the Southampton station site.

I agree with Bill's implicit principle that "all the way to Newtown or nothing" may not be valid. However, based on observation, the first three miles north of Fox Chase would be the hardest part to restore in physical and political terms. Once the crossing at Ayres is reached, the restora...

Yes, SF had one only line; but it had (has) a lot of trains. Patrick Dorin's book, "Commuter Railroads", has a lot about the suburban services of that era. A lot of downtowns were served by a minimal number of weekday-only commuter trains. The scale (from several each to only one round tri...

The Philly Trolley website includes some very old PRT track maps which should identify trackage around Delaware Avenue. I recall riding one post-WWII fantrip on to pier 34, where PRT got some of its material by water transport. The PRT access track(s) crossed the Delaware Avenue railroad tracks. Muc...

Looking back in hindsight, it appears that the Wawa terminal site was arbitrarily chosen but comes with inherently high conststruction costs for a significantly large parking capacity. That's why this and other threads have suggested Lenni or Darlington as interim terminals for this line.

DVRPC's Regional Citizens Committee is suggesting to DVRPC that it conduct two work programs that would study the exploitation of this technology into our area to make the existing railroad passenger network more seamless. The key to these improvements would be operation of dual-powered trains in th...

Was it in Archer's book or elsewhere that it is written that originally LVRR was a Philadelphia-sponsored institution with its long-time headquarters there. The HQ was moved out by Morgan after the 1893 debacle. Indeed, when the P&R suddenly got control of the North Penn system and its Bethlehm-...