I was looking at the satellite image of the site of a million home that burned near Pottstown, PA. Whilst “roaming” around the area I found what appeared to be a former Reading yard on the south side of town, and a little further east, perhaps a major maintenance facility?
PRR also appeared to run through the area, virtually parallel to the Reading. The topo map showed what may have been a pretty good sized interchange yard adjacent to the facility mentioned above.
I really don’t have any overriding interest in the area, but it does appear that what may have been the shops are still standing, although no tracks were in evidence within the compound.
There was - and still is - a former Reading RR yard on the south side of town, on the west end, with a pretty good curve in it. It’s on the southern side of W. High St., north of the Schuylkill River, west of PA Rt. 100, and north and east of where the U.S. Route 422 expressway crosses the Schuylkill River.
I believe that what you’re taking as a major maintenance facility is the former Bethlehem Steel Co. Pottstown fabrication plant. Its on the eastern end of town, with the former Reading line - then ConRail, now NS - on the north, South Keim Street splitting it in half in a slightly northeast-southwest direction, Industrial Highway/ Moser Rd. on its eastern end, and the former PRR brancH on its southern side - Industrial Highway turns west and is about another block further south. The BSCo plant is on about its 2nd resurrection now - that was originally closed in the 1970s, I believe. My father was involved in Redevelopment Authority work nearby as far back as the 1960s. In the middle and late 1980s I did some trackwork there when it was trading as the ‘Pottstown Industrial Complex’ and ‘re-purposed’ into a lumber transload, a contractor for de-PCB-ing the transformers on SEPTA’s Budd Silverliner commuter railcars [PTI Services, Inc.], and a kind of ‘incubator’ for other businesses that needed rail service - but didn’t have much money to pay for track relocations, rehab., upgrades, and repairs, etc. [:(]
What you’re taking to be a PRR interchange yard was instead a local yard to serve the BSCo. plant and the many other nearby industries, ‘back in the day’.
It does have a rail connection - look closely under the bridge of Industrial Highway / Moser Rd. over the former RDG main line, and you should see a trailing-point switch for the lead into it about 200 yds. / 0.1 m
Paul - Considering I was going strictly by what I saw in the satellite image, you’ve filled in the blanks quite well. Given that it’s been what, 30-40 years since the Bethlehem steel complex was used for the stated, I didn’t guess too far off.
Like I said - I have nothing invested in the observation - I’ve never even been to Pottstown.
If you ever do get to Pottstown, there’s a branch line - the Colebrookdale Secondary - that’s just waiting to be a tourist line. It takes off from the ex-RDG main line about 0.1 mile east of the PA Rt. 100 bridge over same, and runs to the west of 100 almost due north about 7 miles to Boyertown, through rolling horse and farm county and along creeks - including 2 trestles. Unfortunately, I believe it’s been filed for abandonment [again].
That looks to have been quite a fire, allright. Million-dollar mansions will burn just as fast as more humble abodes, though - maybe quicker, 'cause they’re bigger. It may be useful to know that I highly doubt that there was any kind of building code in effect where - an outlying township, not in the city - and when [1989] that house was built, beyond paying for the permit fee. So it was proabably built out of whatever and however the homeowner wanted it, without regard to fire separation wall ratings, draft-stopping against fire-extensions, penetrations, etc., etc.
Paul, you are correct about the building code, or lack thereof. I built my house (Upper Mt Bethel township) in 1987 and at that time Rural Pa was still the land of the free and home of the brave. Sometime in the 90’s the legislature enacted a statewide building code. Before that you only needed a working kitchen sink and a toilet and you could get your occupancy permit. Roof? Who needs a roof.[(-D]
From what I understand the line to Boyertown was bought by the county. The ESPN (East Penn RR, not the TV channel) tried to make a go of it, but couldn’t. Unfortunately I heard that most of the little yard they had in Pottstown has been torn up.
John, that’s funny [swg] I know whereof you speak - I used to say that in such townships - North Whitehall Twp. in Lehigh County comes to mind - you could live in a shack with a tarpaper roof. But I like your formulation much better. Thanks. [tup]
This saga of this line has had more twists and turns than a soap opera, so I no longer trust my memory on the important stuff. It’s all fairly well documented on other forums elsewhere - search for ‘Colebrookdale’ and ‘Barto’, as well as Pottstown and Boyertown. Nevertheless, my best recollection is that Berks Co. sold the R-O-W to East Penn Rwy. a few years ago - perhaps when the then-proprietor, John Nolan, was affiliated with the Emons people out of York, PA. Since then, the line has been sold to the current operator, out of Kennett Square, PA.
The only major ‘shipper’ - actually, receiver, of plastic pellets in covered hopper cars - was/ is Drug Plastics and Glass, Inc., a local company that makes essentially pill bottles of various kinds and sizes. But their plant is about 3/4 mile away, so there had to be a transload of all that inbound raw material from the hoppers to an airslide-type tank truck, which just added to the costs. Also, that traffic was only 50 to 70 cars a year, not enough to sustain a 7-mile or so branch line. I had tried to interest them in either moving the transload to the Pottstown facility at the top of this thread, or to the Beth-Intermodal / Lehigh Valley Rail Management operation in Bethlehem, or switching to a domestic container operation from the source Phillips Petroleum plant in Houston or Oklahoma, etc., but no one was interested in any of that then, so I moved on to other things. In the meantime I see that DP and G now has a plant further upstate in the coal regions, in the Shamokin / Paxinos area, that is directly served by rail, so maybe that solved their problem instead. The onl
Now that I’m a little wiser and the railroad and logistics world has changed somewhat - I wonder if that Pottstown facility would make a decent intermodal terminal to serve the northern and western Philadelphia markets, esp. the pharmaceutical industries in the region. It’s right on the main line that isn’t terribly busy, there’s thebyard that Larry noticed just to the west to serve as car storage [it’s now mostly used for ballast hoppers to and from the nearby John T. Dyer traprock quarry, and others], lots of space and indoor crane capacity [if it hasn’t been torn out], and almost direct access to U.S. Rt. 422 and then King of Prussia, the Schuylkill Expressway, the east-west Pennsylvania Turnpike, and U.S. Rt. 202 towards West Chester, and not far to Rts. 73, 100, 23, , etc. Plus, where else in that region can that much level land with an industrial zoning and these other attributes be found [Q] Yes, it might be a little redundant / duplicative with the Beth-Intermodal/ Lehigh Valley Rail Management operation in Bethlehem - also at a former Bethlehem Steel Co. facility - but it’s 40 miles or so closer over not-so-great roads in between, and on another NS line entirely - and maybe 20 miles closer than Reading. The logical and geographical tendency would be to let Bethlehem serve the NJ-NY and beyond markets with I-78 right outside of it and then to PA Rt. 33 and I-80, etc., while letting Pottstown develop to serve the Pennsylvania suburbs of Philadelphia. Well, it’s just a thought . . . [:-^]
Otherwise, the Colebrookdale Secondary is kind of unique in that I think it ought to be served as a life-size, real-world museum display of most kinds of railroad bridges, or highway bridges over it. For example, just outside [south]
I’m pretty sure the county bought it back (at as higher price). The little EMD switcher was, last I saw, sitting at Abrams yard. Railroad.net had a pretty good thread about this. As far as a new intermodal yard, I just don’t see it happening there. Beth is up the road, and there’s Philly if they want to serve that market. Go any farther west than Pottstown, and you’re within spitting distance of HBG and Rutherford.