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. 

A Few Photos from the past Two Months

 

               

                I was looking through some of my recent pictures and came across a few I’d like to share. Many of my shots have stories connected to them. Sometimes it is just some useless facts and other times it is the adventure or journeys I took to get them. I seem to have a pretty good recollection of where and when I took most of my pictures. It is too bad I can’t remember faces and names as well! So here they are, I hope you like them!

12.31.20

                This was taken on the last day of the year no one wants to remember. Frank and I had gone out early in the morning to take some pictures. It was a beautiful morning, it had snowed the night before and everything was covered in white. The snow was about 3-4 inches deep. We did a couple geocaches and then ended up at this site in Fox Chapel. Supposedly this huge house is currently for sale.  The buyers aren’t lining up at the door! As you can see, the building is in pretty bad shape. Our visit here was short lived, we never made it to the house. One of us stepped into an ice covered pond and got drenched. It’s not fun taking pictures in the winter when wet!

1.9.21

                This shot was taken on a Sunday morning after Mass. I was on the Ivory Avenue Bridge that crosses over McKnight Road. I liked the way the hills were shaded as they progressed in towards the city. I took a few shots and then this flock of birds was nice enough to fly into my field of view. It definitely added to the shot!

1.13.21

                The Mayview State Hospital was located a mile or two away from where I work. I have spent a lot of time on the property where it once stood. While it was still in operation AMB and I were chased away from the site. I was taking some pictures of the Victorian looking architecture.  After the buildings were abandoned, I took advantage of broken fences and explored some of the buildings and tunnels that were still standing. Now a nice community of houses, duplexes and businesses stand on the property. The railroad tracks loop around the site. Every so often a train passes by around 3 in the afternoon. If I hear the whistle, I’ll attempt to find a spot to catch a picture of it as it passes by. On this day, the sun was shining in just the right direction, a nice clean engine was approaching and I happened to be at just the right place, right by mile marker #6.

1.25.21

                I pass a few different railroads and rail yards on my way in to work. Which ones depend on how I decide to go in. On this day I was driving on rt. 65 towards the Mckees Rocks Bridge when I saw this train crossing the Ohio River. It was heading in the same direction I was going so decided to stop at the Emsworth Dam and wait for it. There is a parking spot between the tracks where I often stop to watch the trains go by. I got there about four or five minutes before the train showed up. The sky was grey and it just seemed like a B&W type of day. Watching the trains puts me in a good mood, just what I need before I go in to work!

1.27.21

                This is not one of Pittsburgh’s tourist sites.  Pittsburgh is filled with stairs climbing the hillsides, many with street names. This one is called Hyena Way.  It climbs a hill in the North Side section of the city. A few of the houses below are abandoned and more than a few people have used the area to dump their construction debris and trash. Another long set of steps goes up a hill to the left at the bottom of these stairs. There once were houses beside these stairs, people’s homes, now they are just brick and weed filled lots.  Why was I here? A geocache of course… Off in the distance you can see the West End Bridge and Mount Washington.

1.30.21

                Ann Marie and I were taking one of our country side drives and came across this diner in Apollo. It had a muddy parking lot with cars scattered around it. It was definitely showing its age. We drove past it and turned around to take a couple pictures of it. I like the faces in the window. We didn’t stop in to try their food, that will be for a future adventure!

2.6.21

                Below the Conemaugh Dam, north of Blairsville are these railroad bridges. When they built the dam, the rising water behind it would end up flooding sections of the railroad, so they moved it to a higher plane. The viaduct on the bottom, now a road, crosses the river to a tunnel and a power station. The lower bridge was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1907, the upper bridge was constructed in the 1950’s. When they moved the railroad and constructed the new bridge it ended up costing more than it did to build the entire dam! The Pennsylvania canal once paralleled the river, its path was right about where I was standing when I took this picture. Almost all the canals in Pennsylvania had disappeared by 1900, the railroads had taken their business.

2.17.21

                I had just left City Books and was walking back to the car when I passed this alley. It is behind the houses on Beech Street.  I had been looking at a bunch of old photos by various photographers, most of them were cityscapes.  Passing this alley reminded me of some of their shots. I took a few pictures here and further down but this B&W one was my favorite.

2.18.21

                This shot was taken on my way home from work. The Roberto Clemente Bridge can be seen in the background. It was snowing and as I crossed Federal Street I saw the tracks in the snow and pulled over. Luckily there were hardly any other cars on the road. A Sheriffs van passed by and slowed down a bit but he didn’t stop. The shot was handheld; I put my elbows on the Jersey barrier and held my breath as I clicked the shutter. Not bad for a shot taken eleven minutes past midnight!

One last picture, one day while I was sitting near the tracks by the Emsworth Dam, a car pulled up and sat at the crossing. When a train came by I looked over and saw that the moon roof of the car had opened and a young boy had popped his head out. He had a camera and was filming the train as it passed by. They stayed for a couple trains before leaving. He would pop his head out, wave to the engineers and shoot pictures as the train went by. Now there’s a kid after my own heart! Hopefully I’ll get to do that with my grandson Mateo!! It made my day to see it!

Now, once again it is time for me to head to work. My lunch is packed and my camera bag is sitting by the door, ready to go. I’ll be ready in case anything interesting should pop into view. It is amazing how often they do!