Like the last Saturday in October, the Harrisburg NRHS Chapter's annual train show now motivates me to make the drive up I-83 as it is perhaps the one reliable date when the old PRR Power Dispatch office is open to the public and I have a lot of tech oriented friends that are eager to view the whole setup. Since the PDO is reaching a steady state I assigned myself a side quest of checking on the former Reading Railroad CAPITOL tower that stands just a short distance from the Pennsylvania Railroad complex. You can find those photos in addition to Amtrak and NS freight action here. In the parking area adjacent to HARRIS tower a large group of railfans had accumulated at the viewing wall. It turned out that the occasion was Amtrak 50th Anniversary P42DC #108 leading the eastbound Pennsylvanian.
Since parking is limited at the Harrisburg Amtrak station where the power office is located, I park by HARRIS tower and walk over. This has the benefit of providing views of whatever Keystone service equipment is hanging out at the station. On this trip Metroliner Cab Car #9641 was hanging out next to the plastic wrapped GG1 #4859 while ACS-86 #613 was standing on an adjacent track.
On the NS side of things a westbound manifest freight rolled past with C40-10W #7676 and AC44C6M #4122 leading. This was followed by westbound train of largely empty autoracks hauled by a single SD70ACC #1804.
As I said the 1939 Harrisburg Power Office has reached a steady state of restoration with both the Westinghouse and GE SCADA panels attached to their back end relay logic that used to interface with the field substations via the code line. PRR electrification project farmed out work to both Westinghouse and GE as a condition of its government backed loans to help industry recover from the Great Depression. Although inefficient from a strictly business sense, the end result was preserving examples of each technology such that their differences can be compared. For example Westinghouse stored digit information in relays, while GE used stepper switches.
The Reading's CAPITOL tower is the largely forgotten member of the troika of Harrisburg Station area towers. Built in the late 1920's when the Reading was replacing wooden towers with mechanical interlocking machines, CAPITOL managed traffic into the Reading's small Harrisburg station complex as well as transfer movements from the PRR. CAPITOL shared a design common to many towers built across the Reading system before the shift to CTC with similar examples still standing at Wayne Jct and Newtown Jct and demolished examples having existed at Birdsboro, Norristown, Belle Meade and Perkiomen Jct (amoung others). The extended ground floor housed an air compressor plant to work the pneumatic point machines controlled by a US&S Model 14 interlocking machine similar to those at the nearby HARRIS and STATE. CAPITOL closed in the 1950's with control passed to the CTC panel at R TOWER in Rutherford Yard, however the structure was used as a relay room and radio base up into the early NS era.
The visit to CAPITOL put me in a position to catch the arrival of westbound Pennsylvanian Train #43 at the eastern end of the revised STATE interlocking. Power was P42DC #103.
That's all for now. See you next time as I head up to New Englande to get some photos on the old Guilford Rail System Downeaster Route before it was sanitized by CSX.
No comments:
Post a Comment