The smoky dark mists, similar to outflows from turn-of-the-century steam trains, glided over the generally moving, green Northern Pocono Mountains on an ongoing Memorial Day weekend. Would they be able to have been traces of the zone's railroad past?
The weed-growing track, supporting a diesel motor, a hardened steel New York Central, and three maroon, Pennsylvania Railroad mentors close to the Wayne County Visitors Center, were ready for their 13:00, 25-mile rush to Hawley and Lackawaxen as the "Lackawaxen Limited," worked by the Stourbridge Line's Delaware, Lackawaxen, and Stourbridge Railroad Company. From before, clearly developed rail's present.
Having been worked by the Wayne County Chamber of Commerce, and initiating vacationer train administration as far back as September of 1979, the Stourbridge Line ran for over thirty years as a prior interpretation, stopping procedure on December 11, 2011, preceding the current Delaware, Lackawaxen, and Stourbridge Railroad Company, run by the Myles Group, re-employed the tracks as of May 9, 2015.
A 50-minute drive from Scranton to Honesdale, a scrutinize of Main Street, a jab in the Wayne County Historical Society Museum, and an assortment of leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, manuals, and zone related writing saved me here, on the wooden stage, encircled by an expanding accumulate of the train's travelers.
The train's railroad history, albeit quietly inconspicuous, appeared to address me. A look over the mentors uncovered the town's Victorian engineering, which, as a saved pocket, appeared to have withstood the tick of time, and close to the block, ticket window donning Visitors Center was a track-appended imitation of a wooden coal cart showed on a slope. Rails plainly associated the town with its past.
A plaque outside of the authentic culture declared, "Delaware and Hudson Canal. End of the stream joining the Hudson and Delaware waterways. Assembled 1825 to 1828. A gravity railroad feeder arrived at Carbondale. For a long time the anthracite exchange outlet for the area."
As I heard the "All Aboard" moan of the conductor-a virtual tone-and pitch-ideal reverberation of the guidance given via coal shovelers for right around two centuries-and crept toward the mentor with my kindred travelers, I understood that something about the region had attracted me to its past.