erie2937 wrote:I have a copy of the Buffalo & Susquehanna Railroad Main Line Track Chart dated April 1930.
...The chart does not show any bridge of any sort at Cross Fork Junction. ...
As mentioned earlier, looking at the 1937-1942 (the earliest) pictures in Penn Pilot is very interesting (
http://www.pennpilot.psu.edu/). Enter "Short Run, PA" and look from there (if not familiar with Penn Pilot, then click on the red dot just west of Short Run, to be able to download the old aerial photo near the junction). Any ROW from the Cross Fork branch should clearly have still been visible in 1940. South of Cross Fork Junction, it sure seems the Cross Fork branch became modern Junction Rd going south, down to Abbott. South of Abbott, it followed the creek down to Cross Fork. North of Cross Fork junction, my guess is the modern Junction Rd, up to highway 44, never was a railroad ROW.
Back at the junction, in ~1940, the diagonal ROW in the picture, which is the route of the modern Junction Rd, leading to the B&S main, is clearly visible, but it looks overgrown compared to the then road route of Junction Rd over the bridge. Further, looking at topos
http://www.mapper.acme.com, it looks like it would have been a bit tricky to get a train from the yard (just east of the bridge) up in elevation to get to the north bridge approach, as opposed to just taking the diagonal to the south, without the bridge, to get to the branch. So my guess is the diagonal (and modern road ROW) was the original railroad connection to the branch, and the bridge was for Junction Road at one time. Why they would have built a bridge to carry Junction Rd over the main in such a remote area with not so much train or car traffic, back before ~1940, as opposed to a grade crossing , is a good question. It may be that after the Cross Fork Branch came out, the yard area was still used for holding cars when trains were broken into sections to get them through the switchbacks and up the steep grades on the B&S main-- I've read that the maximum car length was only in the range of 5 or 10 cars for freight -- so that a grade crossing in that area would have frequently been blocked. In the time frame of 1913, from what I can make out at Wikipedia, a main part of the B&S business was moving coal, and a lot of it, from the DuBois/Sagamore PA region through Wharton, over the switchbacks, to Galeton, Wellsville, and then to Buffalo. So you could imagine a yard near the summit of the switchbacks to be very busy. Then maybe the the bridge, which perhaps dates to 1914 when the branch came out, [EDIT: the bridge may be from after 1930, according the track chart in the previos post], became outdated or worn out, and by then there was so little traffic on the B&S (if any), that the road bridge was abandoned and the modern road alignment crossing the old B&S main ROW at grade was adopted. But this is all just conjecture!!!
I don't have access to old track charts or the old topos mentioned earlier, which would be interesting. When was the last time this section of the B&S saw traffic?
JS
EDIT: According to the prior post, there was no bridge in 1930 if the track chart is right -- but there was one in 1938 according to the Penn Pilot photo. A 1941 map is not crystal clear, but it sure seems to show an overpass for Junction Rd, and not for other crossings in the area.
ftp://ftp.dot.state.pa.us/public/pdf/BP ... r_1941.pdf
Was their still a lot of train traffic after 1930, so that the grade crossing had to be replaced with a bridge?
