I finally took in a railroad museum today. The venue was Steamtown, which is a National Historic Site owned and operated by the National Park Service. Why, of all the railroad museums in the land is this one is run by the federal government? This answer is “earmark.” In 1986 Congressman Joseph M McCade, who represented the Scranton, Pennsylvania area, got Congress to approve the site as a national park facility. The City of Scranton already owned the an old railroad repair facility, which it had picked up in a bankruptcy sale. And a collection of over 100 steam-era locomotives and train cars, owned by a private foundation, was also on hand. According to Wikipedia, the National Park Service has spent $66 million on the site.
Steamtown is impressive in only ways that federal largess can do it. The displays are well-designed, easy to read, and comprehensive. Steam railway is examined historically, technologically and demographically. Here are some tidbits that caught my attention:
The railroads were responsible for standardized time in the United States. Railroads needed precise scheduling to operate so that multiple trains could run on the same track. Each locality had its own base for calculating time, and these often varied by several minutes from the next locality over. The railroads got together and came up with the General Time Convention in 1876, which was adopted effective November 18, 1883, at 12 Noon. This convention established the four time zones in general use today. However, the convention and its time zones were not officially established until Congress passed the Standard Time Act in 1918.
Steam locomotives were used in regular railroad service for about a century. The last steam locomotive was built in 1949. By 1952, diesel locomotives in service outnumbered steam locomotives. Today steam locomotives can only be found operating in the United States on tourist trains. An obvious reason for their replacement is high maintenance. A steam locomotive spends about half its time in maintenance and repair shops. In comparison, a diesel locomotive only spends one to two days a month undergoing maintenance or repair.
To show how impressed I am with steam power, here is the only picture of a locomotive I took at Steamtown.
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| Steamtown F3 Diesel Locomotive |
My other stop today was at Colgate University, located in the village of Hamilton, New York. From September 1963 to June 1964, I spent my freshman year of college at Colgate. Though it had the moniker of “university,” it was a liberal arts undergraduate college of about 2000 men. It is now co-educational and much larger, and for all I know, now qualifies as a university—which means it offers post-graduate degrees. Colgate has added to , but not replaced, the buildings that existed when I was attending there. The core of the college as I knew it was set of five buildings and a chapel placed around a grassy quadrangle on a hill overlooking the village. The quad cluster is still there, though so many other buildings, mostly larger than the existing buildings, have been placed about it that the pastoral college-on-the-hill motif no longer holds.
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| Colgate University East Residence Hall My Home 1963-64 |
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| Colgate University Chapel On the Quad |
But there aren’t any do-overs, and Colgate and I obviously moved on without each other. A nice visit, but just a been-there, done-that experience.
Mileage: 223. Cumulative Mileage: 2,917
