Saturday - February 13, 2010
A digital diversion
So Chris emails me a link. It’s to a neat geological web page that examines Global Warming and concludes, duh, that the temperatures have been going up and down forever. And that CO2 levels have nothing at all to do with it, that those levels often lag 800 years behind actual climate change, and that at one point in the way way way back, the climate was considerably cooler, yet atmospheric CO2 was 18 times higher than it is right now. Lots of graphs, and an interesting bit of actual science. Plus the author shows how the whole thing is a damnable scam, created to frighten people out of their tax dollars. With self-condemning quotes too. Nice.
So I read that stuff, and explored the rest of that page. It turns out to be a bit about West Virginia geology, and coal mining there. How it’s a good thing that puts people to work. How these days strip mining rebuilds the land when they’re finished, and how the EPA is a bit shortsighted in requiring the miners to put things back “as they were originally”. Because it’s just as easy to fill the holes and replace the overburden and build nice flat farmland that people could use, but no, the EPA demands they build steep hills. Except that “originally” if you go back far enough, West Virginia was flat. It was swampland. On the equator. When the coal beds were laid down, 300 million years ago or thereabouts.
But they kept talking about peat, and Lignite, and bituminous coal. Hey, I didn’t know bituminous came in several varieties. Ok, fine, but what about anthracite? Not a word. I guess WV doesn’t have any. It’s a Pennsylvania thing. So I looked it up. And it is.
Somehow I had thought it was all gone. Not true. Sure, once upon a time miners wrested 114 million tons of the stuff out of the ground per year, but their great grandsons are still pulling up 5 million tons of the stuff per year today. Born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine ...
Anthracite is hard coal, the kind that burns with very little flame and almost no smoke, but lots of heat. Kind of like nice dry birch logs in your fireplace. Is it the “Clean Coal” we’ve been looking for? I can’t say, but the good folks at Reading Anthracite seem to think so:
Mother Nature’s Clean Coal™
The inherent, natural qualities of anthracite coal from the Reading Anthracite Company address the needs for energy, carbon and media solutions.
... even if the media solutions they are talking about are for filtering applications, not the MSM. Um, uh, wait ... aren’t they the same thing? 
So I’m reading all about this hard coal, realizing I’ve got a couple of chunks of it around here somewhere. And that somewhere back in my past, I’ve been in front of a coal fire. I can’t remember where, or when, but I remember it smelled nice. A much softer aroma than pine smoke. And I’m reading how the first commercially dug load of this coal went by barge down the Susquehanna River, the river that’s older than time (really, it almost is. It runs across the mountains not along them. Because the river was already there before the mountains woke up and started growing. And those mountains are the worn down stubs of what they used to be) and it’s starting to feel like Home News. Because I used to live by that river, since one end of it runs through Binghamton NY, where lives the old alma mata. Ok, Three Mile Island is on it too, but way downstream. And that this more expensive black rock was used as a premium fuel by a famous railroad of it’s day, the Lackawanna. Now it’s definitely data within my ken, as I’ve been aware of that line my entire life. In it’s latter days it was the Erie-Lackawanna, but I knew it as the Delaware Lackawanna & Western. The D.L. & W. The “delay, linger, and wait” line that ran across NY, NJ, and PA. And I’m a would-be train junkie anyway. Love them. But I never got the true addiction, never became a train-head. But Big Steam and Old Diesel float my boat, both as physical artifacts and their impact on social history. Like airplanes, only with lots and lots of added mass.
And then the Wiki post mentions Phoebe Snow, and I knew it was Kismet. The Phoebe Snow was the name of the train my mother used to ride to go to college. Back in the days when trains had names, it had the prettiest one. And that’s all I knew about it. And somewhere in this digital odyssey I saw mention of the Lackawanna Cut-off and it all hit home. That’s local history, a turn of last century engineering marvel that was so soon forgotten.
Peiper has the advantage of living in a 2300 year old town, a place that values history. I don’t. Nor do most Americans. Everything is new, everything is now. We kind of shake our heads at our children, or our grandchildren, who think that 1985 was so long ago that dinosaurs still walked the earth. We have no real sense of history here, aside from the rare battlefield park, or some well made colonial building that still stands. Everything else gets torn down, or built over. And then lost. But I had heard of the Cut-off. It’s not far from here. So I started looking. And found that the old rail line that it replaced ... is still here. I drive over the Oxford Tunnel at least once a week to get up to the bowling alley, and I never knew it was there. 103 years ago, the town where I bowl was a going concern, but the cut-off put them out of business, and they still haven’t fully recovered.
A little bit up the same road from the bridge in the picture, outside of the tiny town of Hampton, is another giant pile of concrete. A huge thing. A modern Ozymandius. It has to be the base of another railroad bridge from days gone by. Just the barn size concrete base remains, right up against the road, the bridge missing, the rail bed gone and built over. I always wondered about it, but I couldn’t even envision which way the tracks may have went. I think I might know now; it fell victim to engulf and devour, circa 1900.
Until the mid 1960’s train tracks criss-crossed this state. They were everywhere. The lumber yard downtown here is a rail station. The tracks are gone though. History, buried and forgotten. So many towns have “depot” or “junction” or “station” in their names, but no trains roll by anymore. Want to talk about long gone? Before the trains there were canals. All over the place around here. There’s a little town a dozen miles north east of here called Port Morris. Right next to it is a place called Landing. There is no river anywhere near them you could float anything bigger than a canoe in. But they used to be canal towns. Hey, so did Binghamton. So did lots of places in the north east.
So, canals, cut-offs, railroads that have puffed their way onto the pages of the past. Mysterious lumps of concrete and my awareness that all that is now, was once not. Sadness? No, just something to ponder on a gray cold winter afternoon.
And the Phoebe Snow? Not just the name of a train. A sexy pin-up from the days before emancipation. Before the ideas of sexy or pin-up existed. An icon from the birth of marketing so successful that it drove crowds wild. One of the original hotties. O.H. bay-bay. And a source of memorable jingles far older than the Burma-Shave limericks. Because it all comes together you see. Phoebe Snow was the It Girl of her day, but she was made up. To sell tickets on the railroad. The Lackawanna railroad. And they used her, a confident and lovely woman off on her own [!!! shudders!!!] all dressed in white ... because they powered the train with anthracite, and you could ride that train without looking like Bert the chimney sweep (chim chim cheroo) at ride’s end. And they did it with poetry. Ok, with doggerel, but that’s close enough:
And Phoebe knows
That smoke and cinders
Spoil good clothes
‘Tis thus a pleasure
And delight
To take the Road
Of Anthracite
For fluff and frill
Miss Phoebe finds
Is nearly nil.
It’s always light
Though gowns of white
Are worn on Road
Of Anthracite
And she made them millions. Her face and elegantly dressed figure were on billboards, postcards, trading cards. She sold the idea of a clean train, a luxury ride from New York City to Buffalo NY, the northern gateway city to the interior of the whole country in those days. And not just the ride. She sold the notion of lux, whether in it’s modern posh form, or in it’s more original photonic meaning
by night or day
enjoy her book upon the way
Electric light
dispels the night
Upon the Road of Anthracite
The land in the central and eastern portions of Pennsylvania is very folded. Folded like the serpentine bit in the middle of a piece of cardboard. It’s called the Endless Mountain area, and with good reason. And the eastern edge of that Endlessness starts right here in NJ, pretty much under my feet. So when they built the Cut-off, the idea was to level out and to straighten out the train tracks, which up until then had to double back and forth all over the place to get over the hills and valleys they couldn’t tunnel through. Which is why the Cut-Off was an engineering marvel on the order of building the Panama Canal. When it was all done it had several of the largest fill areas under the roadbed in the nation. A fill is what you build when you have to get your choo-choo across a declivity in the land too shallow and perhaps too long to build a bridge over. It’s a bloody great pile of rock, with trains on top. And when they hit rivers that couldn’t be filled, they built the 3 largest viaducts in history, 2 of them right here in NJ, and pioneered the used of reinforced concrete. And they did it on time, and under budget, for both the Paulinskill and the Delaware River viaducts. And they’re still standing, 103 years later. In 1907, taking a high speed train (70mph!) across those bridges, 120 feet up in the air, must have felt like that other new-fangled activity, flying. So of course they had Phoebe sell that experience too
My favorite trains
O’ertop the lofty mountain chains
There’s cool delight
At such a height
Upon the Road of Anthracite
And you could take the train from Hoboken (just across the tunnel from NYC) to Buffalo in a mere 8 hours. And be well fed and not get dirty. They made more millions.
But they could not escape the Law of Unintended Consequences. Phoebe Snow planted the seed of the idea of the Independent Woman in people’s minds. Sure, she was classy, and proper, and not at all naughty. And perfectly safe and well cared for on her special train. But she was doing it all without a man leading her around. Amazing. Radical. And still the subject of both Advertising and Womyn’s Studies today.
As an icon, she sold a clean ride and a new cultural image for the American Girl on the go—an image that lasted nearly 70 years.
How about that?
Posted by Drew458
on 02/13/2010 at 07:56 PM
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff • History • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •
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