Reliving the Past

During the past couple weeks I have been limiting my travels a bit due to a pinched nerve in my neck. While the trips I've taken had been enjoyable, I paid for them the next day.

    My friend Frank had recently found a couple pictures from a trip we had taken down to West Virginia a while ago and shared them with me. We both remembered the trip but there were a couple questions we had about it.

    We weren’t sure of when we went and we also were puzzled about the pictures themselves, since they were taken on film. We thought that we had both switched over to digital cameras when we had taken this trip.

    We knew that we had been in West Virginia, that was one clue. We also remembered a geocache we had found while on it, one that had been hidden near a mine and a furnace of some type. Another clue was my Jeep. It sat on the edge of the picture, that fact helped narrow down the time period.

    I started looking through my pictures trying to find some from that day. My collection of photos is organized by the date they were taken, not by subject or location, not much help for this! I checked through my furnace pictures, organized by name. In these photos I found a file titled “Unknowns”. Inside there was a folder titled “Unknown Furnace or kiln in WV 100702”. Ah ha! Inside I found 15 pictures of the furnace I was thinking of. Frank was in some of them also. 

    My labeling system is rather easy. The date is listed by year, (10) month (07) and the by day (02). This would mean that these pictures had been taken on July 2, 2010, about 15 years ago. So, now we had a date.

    Another question was, where are the rest of the pictures taken that day? I went to my external hard drive but those photo files only went back 4-5 years. I needed to go further back. I dug into my older shots, saved on memory sticks, camera memories and CDs. Thankfully they are in order!

    On a memory stick I found a folder entitled “100702 Trip to WV with Frank” Inside this folder was 127 pictures taken that day. Success!

    It is always fun reliving the past, so let me take you along on a trip to West Virginia.

    Stepping back into the past…

Sunrise

    Frank and I always attempt to be on the road early. Should there be a nice sunrise, we would like to be able to catch it! A short distance past Friendsville, Maryland we pulled over on the side of the road to catch the sun coming up over the mountains. We were about a 100 miles into our trip, about two hours away from my home. It was 6:05 in the morning. We had left home at just the right time!

    Moving towards the west we entered West Virginia. One of the places we wanted to visit was a section of RR track that we called West Virginia’s Horseshoe Curve. Now whether anyone else calls it this I don’t know. I’m not sure where this even is other than in WV.  It gave us a spot to aim towards. 

The “Curve”

    We found the spot about an hour and a half after sunrise. We took some pictures, found an old cemetery and waited for a train to go by. After waiting for a while, we decided to call it quits and continue on. 

House exploration

    While exploring an old, deserted house, Frank realized that he had lost his hat. It had his fishing license on it so we headed back to the RR tracks to see if we could find it. There it was, sitting on the road. Just after he picked it up…we heard a train laboring up the hill.  

The train!

Continuing up the mountain

    We caught some nice pictures of it as it passed us. There was a reason that the hat was left behind! The story of the “lost hat” is a story we tell often.  We would have never gotten a picture of the train on the curve if it hadn’t been forgotten!

A cache

Outside the mine

Inside

Cache hidden inside a mill

The Virginia Furnace

    We did some caches as we continued south including one near a limestone mine and a kiln. We stopped at an old grist mill and an old iron furnace where other caches were hidden. There was lots of history that we visited on this trip!

The Grafton Rail Yard

Leaving the yard

    We later ended up in Grafton where we took pictures of the rail yard and the turntable that sits on the edge of Three Fork Creek. We headed back towards home after that. It was almost 7 when we got back to Frank’s house, truly a long trip!

Bob and Frank’s camera

    The pictures we found brought back some good memories and answered a couple questions. We found out the date, and on one of the last pictures, what camera Frank had been using, a Pentax ME Super. He got a digital camera soon after. (Now he is experimenting with film again I’m happy to say!)

    It is always fun reliving the past by looking at old pictures. They help us (especially ME!) remember. 

Comin' Round the Curve

 

As is so often the case with pre-planned days, this one started with rain.  Thankfully it wasn’t much more than a light sprinkle. We sure weren’t going to let it stop us from enjoying our trip!

We had been planning this “photo-expedition/geocache search” for a couple weeks. Our final destination would be the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona.  We were planning on going up the hill on the backside of the curve to take some pictures of trains. On our way over, we would make a few stops to try our luck at finding some geocaches.

Frank and I have taken countless photo trips, starting sometime in the 80’s and continuing on through the present day. Frank is a fine photographer and we always enjoy discussing photography and our various other hobbies. Whether our photos turn out good or bad, the day sunny or rainy, we always seem to have a good time.

We left Franks house around 6:30 in the morning. The windshield wipers were only used intermittently, the day was looking good.

Our first stop was at a BBQ joint. It wasn’t to get some food, it was to find a cache. We had been here previously but hadn’t realized that there was a cache hidden there. Since the place was closed, the food option was off the table. We settled on finding the cache instead. It was an easy find, inside a box that contained a rubber pig that oinked when the lid was opened.

On top of a mountain about 5 miles away we made our next stop. This cache was hidden in a small ambulance! Cool, you never know what you might find when you’re geocaching! The radio towers across the highway were partially hidden by the fog. Further down the road we would see fog hugging the hillsides on the distant mountains. Pennsylvania has so many nice views!!

A few “pedestrian” caches followed; nothing real exciting other than the thrill of another find. Rt. 22 has hundreds of caches hidden near it. We picked only a small quantity and left the others for another time. There were two that we couldn’t locate. We looked in all the usual spots but couldn’t find them. We left because we had more important things to do, like watching trains!

Driving to the curve using the back roads avoided going into Altoona. Getting off rt.22 at Gallitzin gave us clear roads with hardly any traffic and no traffic lights. We reached the back side of the curve in about 15 minutes.

Our camera gear was packed in our backpacks. I carried a tripod, planning on using it as a hiking staff if needed. We doused ourselves in bug spray and started up the hill. It was a steep climb but other than a few stops for me to catch my breath, there were no problems.

At the top, we were uphill from the observation platform in the center of the curve. We looked down at the building and the locomotive that is sitting there. The rocks we set up on were thankfully in the shade, not that we had to worry about sunlight. It was just brighter and hotter out on the tracks.

Not much was happening at first. Two trucks were up the tracks a bit, the workers were doing some sort of maintenance. We sat and waited and BS’d.

The picture above shows the curve from space. The yellow line is our path up to the curve and the approximate spot where we set up. Altoona is located off to the upper right of the picture. The track rises as it goes towards Gallitzin, off the picture at the lower right. The curve was built in 1854 by the Pennsylvania Railroad to allow trains to cross the Allegheny Mountains. The curve, approximately a quarter mile across uses the topography of the mountains to lessen the grade to the summit.

 As we sat and talked, we heard a couple toots and then the echoes from across the valley. The men cleared off the tracks and a train came downhill towards us. The engineer tooted to the men as he passed them and then again to us as he went by. A short while later we heard another toot as he passed the observation deck.

A few minutes passed and then an Amtrak train came down the hill, heading east into the curve. He tooted also as he passed the observation deck. It must be in the engineers handbook; “Always toot your horn at railfans on the Curve!”

Next to appear was a train heading west, coming uphill out of Altoona. This one was going slow; we heard the noise of the growling engines before we saw them. There were three locomotives pulling the train. We didn’t think to count the cars. The train seemed to go on forever. We guessed that there were at least 300 cars. Two engines were helping at the end. It is amazing to me to think how much power was in those 5 engines!

After that train there was a lull in the action. Then the sounds of another reached us and finally we saw the engines slowly coming into view across the valley. Eight engines pulled this train! Wow, this will be a long one we thought. We started counting the cars as they passed. 

Forty seven… That was it?  Maybe the engines were being taken somewhere? They sure didn’t need that many to pull that small amount of cars. While we were watching and counting, another eastbound train passed on the tracks behind it. This train was much longer and had some helpers positioned in mid train. It passed before the westbound train passed us.

Once these trains had passed we packed our gear and returned to the car. We had been here for about an hour and a half; we were ready to get moving again. The path going down the hill was much easier going down! We did another cache located inside the bowl of the bend. Frank signed the log as another train passed on the curve above us. We then stopped at two other caches but decided to pass on them since they involved some risky climbing.

The caches I do these days pale in comparison to some of the ones I’ve done in the past. My body just doesn’t bend and stretch as well as it used to. Then there is the healing time, which tends to drag out a bit longer than in the old days!

We were back home around 2PM. My odometer showed that I had traveled a little over 200 miles. We had no slips or falls and we found most of the caches we searched for. I only got us lost once, which is about average, but Frank quickly found our road and we were back on track again. I felt pretty good when we got back, after a stretch or two my back muscles felt normal once again. The pictures came out well and the rain had held off for most of the trip. There were no problems; it was a good trip…as always!

Note; I have to say, I did have one small problem. I found a tick on me before I went to bed. Hopefully it was the only one.  Human nature being as it is, for the next hour or two, I could feel “them” crawling all over me!