Despite a rainy day (to put it mildly), we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at Steamtown National Historical Park in Scranton, Penn. The site contains a roundhouse and a working turntable that moves huge locomotives from their bays to the yard tracks. And those engines...incredible! Most of the park's collection are steam-driven, but there are a few diesels around, too. We also walked through an old Pullman business car, a post office car, a caboose and a freight car, and rode on restored commuter passenger coaches from the 1920s. The museum does a fantastic job of explaining the workings of steam engines as well as detailing the history of steam trains, especially in eastern Pennsylvania.
The aspect we most enjoyed was seeing the unique "faces" of the engines...they seem to have personalities, with windows and front lights that look like eyes and nose; some have what look to be mouths, made of various pipes and mechanical gadgets. There were many more engines that we couldn't view; they're in various states of restoration, and plans are in place to one day build an additional facility within the park that will display many more of them. This place is an absolute treasure.
Our time at Steamtown was accentuated by our lunch inside the Radisson Station Hotel in Scranton. It used to be the ornate Lackawanna Railroad Station, complete with an arched Tiffany-window roof in the grand hall and lots of beautiful woodwork throughout. Radisson has done a wonderful job of preserving the elegant old as they've modernized the facility into a contemporary hotel. We left our picnic bag in the truck and splurged for a yummy lunch of soup and hot tea...the rain made us crave the warmth. It was so easy to sit in the former grand hall, gazing up at those stained-glass windows, and imagine the comings and goings of commuters and tourist passengers, heading to and from the tracks, dressed beautifully with hats, long coats and even gloves (it was a classier time, when travel was something you dressed up for and appreciated as a treat). We also imagined how much my dad would have enjoyed experiencing this place with us, as he was the consummate train buff. Our day in Scranton was a great one for family, past and present, with lots of reminiscing coupled with hopeful dreaming of future fun on trains!
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| One of the steam engines inside the museum...it's cut away on the opposite side to reveal the workings of the steam engine (2 photos down) |
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| the cupola of a caboose |
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| sorting imaginary mail in a post office car |
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| the engine that earlier had pulled us on a short excursion, heading to bed in the round house after a rotation on the turntable |
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| the former grand hall of the Lackawanna Station, now the Radisson hotel. It's not hard to picture it with long wooden benches and ticket windows. |
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| Fall's a coming...as seen through a rainy window in a truck moving 65 mph! |
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