PA picture thread (Pittsburgh, New Castle: 2013, restaurant, rated)

[GypsyLady13]

johnstown pa

[AgelessStranger]

Took a walk along Forbidden Drive in Philadelphia last Friday..

[AgelessStranger]

French Creek State Park :

[PAhippo]

not sure if I've posted this one before.

[DowntownHarrisburg]

Tunnel along the Abandoned PA Turnpike:





Walking along the Abandoned Turnpike:





Easement for the stillborn South Pennsylvania Railroad (Vanderbilt's Folly):



Downtown Harrisburg during a major snowstorm:

[pman]

the south penn RR should have been built, the fact that it wasn't is still biting us in the ass today. we can blame JP Morgan who feared that vanderbilt's new railroad would force the PRR into upgrading their right of way and push them into competing in NYS as well...this round of improvements would be bad for his dividends. Morgan was right, of course, it was bad for his dividends but good for the country and our state in particular. one man who supported vanderbilt? Andrew Carnegie. why? competition would have lowered the cost of shipping steel to the ports...not to mention the south penn would have been 40 miles shorter and at least an hour faster passenger train wise.

[DowntownHarrisburg]

Harrisburg during the flood of 2011:





A train makes its way across the swollen river on the first evening of flooding.



That same bridge on a normal day. The stump pier in the background is actually part of a never-built bridge for the South Pennsylvania Railroad. The project was killed mid-build and several of the piers have been standing there since the late 19th century.



View from my penthouse corner apartment. The groundwater flooding under the railroad bridge in the foreground was about 6' shy of flooding the underground substation at Second & Chestnut. Also note the flooded I-83 ramps towards the left. The intersection of Second & Paxton was completely impassible, but that didn't stop people from trying ... and getting trapped. Repeatedly.

[DowntownHarrisburg]

Centralia Mine fire. There are still people who swear that the fire is not real and that Centralia is actually a metropolitan tourist destination.



Concrete City, just outside of Nanticoke (not too far from LCCC). Built as a prototype progressive coal mining town in 1910, abandoned just a few years later. The buildings are cast-in-place reinforced concrete and the cost of demolition is staggering.





Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, Scranton:



One of the things about living in the capital is that there's never any shortage of protests at the capitol. Sometimes it's a handful of nutjobs (sorry, "talk radio listeners") demanding that Governor Rendell admit he's an alien from the planet Xjkfda, sometimes it's a large crowd of citizens protesting a late-night secret pay raise that our legislators gave themselves. In 2009 the state stopped paying its employees, and several thousand of them gathered to protest. The state was later found to have violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, but was never prosecuted.

[DowntownHarrisburg]

Ricketts Glen State Park is the best state park. The falls trail speaks for itself.

[AgelessStranger]