We started our trip through New England and on to WV for the Seventh-day Baptist General Conference by staying at Outdoor World Scotrun in Scotrun, PA on 05/02/2012. On 05/04/2012 we drove up to Scranton, PA to visit the Electric City Trolley Museum and Scranton Iron Furnaces. The Electric City Trolley Museum is a collaborative effort involving many partners. Together they have created a premier electric railway museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1887, Scranton was Pennsylvania’s first city with a successful pioneer trolley line and became known as “The Electric City.” The museum collection provides a highly representative picture of the electric railway history of eastern Pennsylvania, from the Philadelphia region to Northeast Pennsylvania. The museum was created by the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Authority. Lackawanna County manages the museum day-to-day. The facility itself, located on the Steamtown National Historic Site, is on long-term lease from the National Park Service. The trolleys operate over tracks owned by both Steamtown and the Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority, including a portion of the historic Lackawanna & Wyoming Valley “Laurel Line” third-rail interurban right-of-way. The picture is of the Trolley Museum.
We also took a ride on a trolley. The picture is of Abigail on her first trolley ride.
The Scranton Iron Furnaces are located near the Steamtown National Historic Site and represent the early iron industry in the United States. The four massive stone blast furnaces are the remnants of a once extensive plant operated by the Lackawanna Iron & Steel Company. Started in 1840 as Scranton, Grant & Company, the firm had the largest iron production capacity in the United States by 1865. By 1880 it poured 125,000 tons of pig iron, which was converted in rolling mill and foundry into T-rails and other end products. In 1902, the company dismantled the plant and moved it to Lackawanna, New York to be closer to the high-grade iron ores coming out of the Mesabi range. The Scranton Iron Furnaces, situated in a historic park setting, are open to visitors year-round from dawn to dusk. In the summer months, facilities are available for picnics. The picture is of the Iron Furnaces.
Then on 05/05/2012 we drove back to Scranton, PA to visit the Steamtown National Historic Site. Steamtown NHS occupies about 40 acres of the Scranton railroad yard of the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, one of the earliest rail lines in northeastern Pennsylvania. At the heart of the park is the large collection of standard-gauge steam locomotives and freight and passenger cars that New England seafood processor F. Nelson Blount assembled in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1984, 17 years after Blount’s untimely death, the Steamtown Foundation for the Preservation of Steam and Railroad Americana, Inc., brought the collection to Scranton, where it occupies the former DL&W yard. When Steamtown National Historic Site was created, the yard and the collection became part of the National Park System. The Steamtown Collection consists of locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, and maintenance-of-way equipment from several historic railroads. The locomotives range in size from a tiny industrial switcher engine built in 1937 by the H.K. Porter Company for the Bullard Company, to a huge Union Pacific Big Boy build in 1941 by the American Locomotive Company (Alco). The oldest locomotive is a freight engine built by Alco in 1903 for the Chicago Union Transfer Railway Company. The picture is of the Nickel Plate Road 514 Diesel on the Turntable which was the engine that pulled the train that we rode on.
