Took a little business trip to Chambersburg, Pa. and was startled to discover what I hadn't known was up there.
No fewer than four surviving rail stations, plus a surviving six-stall roundhouse. The latter is used as a farmers' market, but was not open when I was there.
What almost made me run off the road and wreck the car, however, was the unexpected sight of a rather new public park, Norlo Park, along Rt. 30 in Fayetteville, a couple miles to the east of Chambersburg, with a stretch of track with two cabooses, a flat car, and--lo and behold--a wooden tank car with reporting marks and a "color bar code" ACI label sign on it! The signage indicated only two pertinent facts: The tank car was originally a 1929 flat car upon which the wooden tank had been added in 1939; and the one handsome PRR portholed-window N5C caboose, PRR 477951, was a Cumberland Valley Chapter NRHS project (the caboose sign had more information on the history of the one caboose). Apparently the better caboose is/was occasionally opened to the public, and is restored inside; the other caboose is sound and in a nice coat of red primer(?) but awaits interior restoration. The flat car was a flat red with nice deck but no identification; an online roster (at the Phillipsburg RR Historians website, of all places) indicates this is 477045, an N5 built in 1916. Sadly, the silver tank car, NFPX 22, had a wooden tank way beyond hope, held together with little more than its silver paint. Parts were literally falling off of this car.
The one caboose, as I recall, had been displayed by the CV-NRHS at a regional tourist information office adjacent to I-81 in what had been a replica of yet another rail station.
A bit of further online, map/atlas, and book research revealed that the park was partially built upon what had been, to me at least, possibly one of the very few stretches of rail line to escape my attention in the region: the Mount Alto Railroad, between Waynesboro and a junction with the former Cumberland Valley RR near Scotland, later swept up into the PRR. Amazingly, this line was built around 1879 and survived until the Penn Central era, surviving one attempt by the PC to abandon it around 1972 and finally not being included in Conrail.
Sadly but unfortunately not untypically, I was unable to find any online representation of either this exhibit or the Cumberland Valley Chapter NRHS aside from a directory listing at the NRHS site and photos from an Audobon Society chapter website. Well, birds were fluttering from the ruins of the tank car..........
