Monday, July 27, 2009

Steamtown





The Girl had a 1pm daykiller birthday party so I took the Boy and our cousin to The Steamtown National Historic Site, in Scranton Penn.

They have an operating turntable. They drove an giant steam engine onto it so it could get its maintenance. My son happened to be in the perfect spot as it drove onto the platform. The roundhouse operator looked right at him and said to him "Which way should we spin her?" The boy pointed clockwise and that is the way she went!

I had a short talk with that man. He drives 200 miles one weekend a month to help fix these old steam engines. He said the federal government has a good deal with the 50 or so regular volunteers who "work" there. I agreed with him that it's great for the Parks Dept. That they get him to work for free. But I pointed out to him that he is probably getting the best end of the stick. He gets to put on one of those blue and white engineers hats and drive a 120 ton steam engine. He agreed.

That is a "Big Wheel"

3 comments:

  1. Looks like an interesting place--will have to get the little ones up there. They enjoyed the Railroaders Musuem in Altoona, and are interested in trains.

    Thanks for stopping by my site as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the heads-up. This looks like an interesting, hard edged aesthetics kind of day. -Jayne

    ReplyDelete

You do not have to be nice!

This is not me

This is not me
Not me.

Blog Archive