Flotsam

-GOOGLE:
The other night, for laughs, I Googled “Bob Hughes.”
The main reason I did was to see if the bluster-boy was lobbing rotten tomatoes onto the Internet.
People do that nowadays.
Employers Google a potential employee to see what scurrilous baloney has been posted, often by angry past lovers and jilted companions.
I wouldn’t put that past the almighty Bluster-King, since I had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to dispute his CLEARLY ERRONEOUS recollection of where we got off I-80 during our motorbike-trip to the mighty Curve, this starting a torrent of rotten tomatoes.
Angry wackos post vitriol and insanity about someone, and then some potential employer believes it.
But what I got (and there were 4,290,000 hits) were references to some real-estate salesman, a TV-soaps character, and some guy awarded an award for meritorious service to Multiple Sclerosis.
There also was some guy named “Bob Hughes” who wrote some book about ‘pyooter-based media and its working culture.
Years ago, while I drove bus, some guy named “Bob Hughes” was the art-critic for Time Magazine. A fellow driver asked if that was me.......
No doubt, one of them 4,290,000 hits is me on FlagOut.
But nothing from the almighty Bluster-King yet.

-JAMBOREE:
In July of 1957, the Boy Scouts of America held their national jamboree at Valley Forge, west of Philadelphia.
The Summer 2007 issue (it’s quarterly) of my Classic Trains Magazine has a large treatment of this because the nation’s railroads came together to deliver the 35,000 scouts to-and-from the park.
Valley Forge is on the southwest side of the Schuykill River valley, which was also threaded by the Reading (RED-ing) Railroad — in fact, its main line.
Valley Forge is where George Washington encamped his Continental army during the winter of 1777, early in the Revolutionary War. It was frigid and many of his troops did not survive. (Conditions were so bad, Washington was afraid troops would desert and the effort collapse.)
I remember visiting Valley Forge when I was a little boy, but I paid more attention to the Reading — which was still steam.
Reading had two stations in the park, but not the capacity of mighty Pennsy. Pennsy’s Norristown branch was electrified to Norristown (about 10 miles from the park), but that was the end of the wire.
Pennsy went up the Schuykill River valley too; but on the north side, and after Norristown diesels had to be used, plus the scouts had to be moved across the river. (I.e. Pennsy didn’t directly access the park.)
Coaches came from all over the nation, and got switched into trains to Valley Forge (or out the Norristown line).
It was the onliest time GG1s ever went to Norristown, normally the domain of owl-face commuter-trains and freights. (The Norristown branch is not the Main Line of the Pennsy.)
Reading also ran sightseer trains for the scouts to Philly — Reading Terminal on Market St.
Reading could assemble large trains — including gobs of borrowed equipment — and load them directly at the park; although they had to upgrade and increase platform-space, and install johns.
They used Geeps and 900/901; F-units I once rode behind. They also used borrowed CNJ power to switch cars.
It was probably the greatest movement Reading ever made. They had to do a lotta planning; including the head-honcho.

-IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE BIG MAN:
(And prepare to get deluged with F-bombs if you fire up this here link. —Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.)
Last night (Friday, May 4, 2007) I perused a flyer on the proposed Bloomfield School District annual budget, which we get to vote on........
It mentions setting up a capital-reserve fund for schoolbus purchases. Doing so avoids borrowing, and facilitates state-aid.
So here we are driving a street in Bloomfield, and we get stopped by a schoolbus loading up kids to bus to the school around the corner.
GOOD GRIEF! We never had no schoolbuses in our day.
In our day, we had to WALK TO SCHOOL — FIFTY MILES; and it was uphill both a-comin’ and a-goin’.
WE HAD TO WALK TO SCHOOL BAREFOOT IN SNOW EIGHT INCHES DEEP!
And the wind was always in our face — if we turned around, the wind turned around too.
Always snowin’ too — even in summer.
Daddy builds a nice enclosed shelter for the kids to wait for the schoolbus in, but do they use it?
OF COURSE NOT! They’re in mom’s minivan idling at the end of the driveway; and THEN SHE COMPLAINS ABOUT THE PRICE OF GAS!

-MANUFACTURED-HOMES:
A few lots up the street, which is south on State Route 65 (the road we live on), since 5&20 is at a higher location, is a vacant-lot where a manufactured-home dealer stores house-trailers and halves of manufactured-homes — probably illegally.
The lot is adjacent to Michael Prouty park, where I walk the dog each afternoon.
For at least two years the halves of a partially burned manufactured-home were stored akimbo on the lot. Actually only the end was burned — the parts are intact, though not bolted together.
Now one half is gone — in fact, both halves were gone last week; but now one is back.
Makes me wonder what is going on; it’s hard to imagine someone buying one-half of a manufactured-home.

-CRESSON:
May’s entry in my Norfolk Southern calendar is of an NS freight-train passing a waving little boy at the Cresson Railfan park.
It looked familiar: I’ve been there. The park (viewing area) is below the railroad-grade — although I’m sure in the 1800s they were at the same elevation. It’s just that the railroad-grade has been raised as ballast was added over-the-years.
I once saw an old photograph of the guy — his name was Brandimart, and he was Italian — who supervised Pennsy’s crossing of the Allegheny Mountains, which include the mighty Curve.
Brandimart was holding a large vertical ruler which indicated the railroad had been raised over four feet since his employ.
We’ve been at Cresson many times.
It’s not a very good railfan spot. It’s out in the open; which means too much sunlight (no shade).
Once we were there when it was socked in by fog — and it was raining; which you couldn’t escape. What a drag; get drenched trying to watch trains.

“Bob Hughes” is of course me, BobbaLew, a nickname I was given eons ago (1961) while on the staff of a boys summer-camp.

“The bluster-boy” (“the almighty Bluster-King”) is my younger brother-in-Boston, who bad-mouths everything I do or say. He always refers to his strident pot-shots as “lovingly-lobbed rotten tomatoes.”

“The mighty Curve is Horseshoe Curve near Altoona, Pennsylvania, by far the BEST railfan site on the entire planet.

RE: “While I drove bus.......” For 16&1/2 years I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service in Rochester.

“FlagOut” is our family’s web-site. (I had a Down Syndrome brother who always wanted the flag out — “flag-out” he’d shout.)

“Pennsy” is the Pennsylvania Railroad; no longer in existence. For years it was “The Standard Railroad of the World”— the General-Motors of railroading.

The “GG1” was the finest electric locomotive the Pennsylvania Railroad ever had. —Probably the finest railroad-locomotive of all time.

“Owl-face” were the Pennsylvania Railroad’s commuter-coaches — electrically self-powered. A commuter-train could be made up of “owl-faces.” “Owl-face” because the end of the car had round (port-hole shaped) windows, making them look like owls.

“Philly” is of course Philadelphia.

“Geeps” is the generic name for General-Motors GP7 and GP9 road-switchers.

“CNJ” is Central of New Jersey (railroad).

“5&20” are State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20, the main east-west highway through our area. Two routes on a single roadway.

“Cresson” Pennsylvania is a little town west of Allegheny summit (Gallitzin) and Horseshoe Curve. The helper-locomotives that help trains climb (and descend) the Allegheny crossing are based there.

“Norfolk Southern” is the railroad that came to own and operate the old Pennsy main across Pennsylvania — including the mighty Curve. Pennsy merged in 1968 with New York Central, and promptly went bankrupt. Penn-Central, and quite a few other eastern bankrupt railroads, were turned over to Conrail, which at first was government-financed, but eventually went private. A few years ago Conrail was split into two halves and sold; most of the ex-Pennsy lines going to Norfolk Southern, and the ex-NYC lines going to CSX.