My calendar for March 2018

Outta the fog. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

—“How come so many like this picture?” I ask. (Seven so far.)
The March 2018 entry in my calendar is an eastbound Norfolk Southern freight on Track Two tiptoeing out of the fog atop Allegheny Mountain.
It just exited two-track Allegheny tunnel atop the summit. Track Three, which is only westbound, is just next to it. Track One, eastbound only, is up on the embankment in the left of the photograph. Track Two can be either direction.
Track One uses New Portage tunnel, which is slightly higher than Pennsy’s original tunnel. Pennsy got New Portage when they obtained PA’s Public-Works System, a combination canal with portage railroad over Allegheny Mountain.
PA abandoned Public-Works as too cumbersome and slow. It was originally meant to compete with NY’s Erie Canal. New Portage Railroad and its tunnel were built to circumvent the original portage railroad, which had inclined-planes.
Pennsy could use New Portage tunnel as an added summit tunnel. The railroad was pulled up, but then re-tracked to give Pennsy additional trackage across the mountain. Pennsy also built a connector between its original alignment and the New Portage railroad alignment. That trackage was abandoned again, and its right-of-way cut by highway construction.
Track One crosses that abandoned connector via a bridge barely visible. Pennsy also had to ramp up to that bridge and New Portage tunnel. That ramp is known as “The Slide,” and is 2.28%, steeper than the original Pennsy which was 1.75-1.8%. Trains only go down “The Slide.”
This fog picture is not what I intended. I try to run melting snow in March, but I couldn’t find the original camera-chip that had the picture I wanted.
I made CDs of my earliest chips, but stopped years ago when I realized I could just save the chips. Beyond that my computer hard-drive, at 500 gig, is so big it could easily swallow the hundreds of image-files my brother-and-I shoot in a single train-chase.
And those image-files are all 300 pixels-per-inch = quite large. 15-20 train-chases so far, and I’m only at 25% hard-drive capacity. And that includes lots more than just train pics.
Save away, baby! And I also have a 500-gig external backup — and I’ve used it to retrieve what was lost from this rig itself.
“I really like that train poking out of the fog.”
My brother-and-I drove down from the summit on a twisting single-lane dirt-track. It’s a marked public road to a cemetery at a long-abandoned coal-mining camp. For some distance the dirt-track is right next to the railroad. We’d been there before, but never in fog.
“What are we gonna do with this?” I asked.
“Just shaddup-and-shoot,” my brother said. The train pictured was coming; it called out “UN” before entering the summit-tunnel.
We both shot, but mine was slightly better. If my brother’s was better I’d use his. A dumb picture to my mind, but everyone likes it. They’d probably like it more than what I wanted to use. Not bad for fog, so I’ll think about it.

• “UN” are the telegraph call-letters of an interlocking where a signal is. The “UN” interlocking is where a loop-track atop the mountain connected back to Track One. Helper-locomotives could help a train up The Hill, uncouple at the summit, then use the loop to go back down the mountain for another help. That’s rarely done any more. Helpers stay on back down The Hill to help hold back a descending train with dynamic braking.