Wednesday on the rails, Part 1

Monday we traveled to the Pocono Mountains. Tuesday was spent on the Lehigh River.

Wednesday dawned similarly sunny and hot for a daytrip to Scranton. We visited the Electric City Trolley Museum, run by Lackawanna County, and the Steamtown National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. One of Scranton’s nicknames is “Electric City.” It had one of the first trolley systems in the country run on electric rather than pulled by animals or cables. These flourished in cities large and small until about the 1950s, when gas-powered automobiles and buses superseded them. Alas, we missed the trolley rides by a day, but we wanted to spend Wednesday out of the sun and heat.

"Get off the tracks!"

The museum is a semi-professional affair with an ancient (c. 2000) website and a collection of reconstructed trolleys, artifacts, newspaper clippings, and assorted signage. I thought it suffered from the amateur mistake of thinking "because we own 17 transformers, we should display 17 transformers" instead of choosing one representative and really explaining what it is and does. I recognize this is something of a philosophical question (is there truth in the one or in the many), as anthropology and natural history museums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries classically exhibited all their specimens, in order to let visitors draw their own conclusions from the many examples with their natural variations.

Above is "the greatest backyard train the local news has ever seen." When we got back to the cabin, we looked up the John Oliver segments that explain why his name and face were at the museum. Local news station WYEP 16 has an electric train and trolley set that play in the background during the weather report. HBO let Last Week Tonight use some of their "funny money" to create a large, interactive train set. And the city accepted the gift! Here's the dedication ceremony.

After a late-afternoon snack at a shady table with a moseying groundhog in the background, we visited Steamtown National Historic Site, a free museum. They show a reasonably well-done, “biographical” film of a boy who loved steam locomotives who grew up with the railroad from the 1910s to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when diesel engines took over hauling freight and cars and planes replaced passenger rail. We perused a timeline of rail in the United States, looked at a bunch of big trains, and appreciated the multi-media exhibit demonstrating how exactly a coal-fired locomotive works.

After two museums, it was time for lunch and then to explore downtown Scranton in Part 2.