Perkiomen Railroad

This one's for me so feel free to look away and count blue cars, photograph coconut trees, eat sunflower seeds or whatever it is you do when someone asks you to look away.

I found this amazing website on the Perkiomen branch of the Reading Railroad. This is the long abandoned railroad line on which the current Perkiomen Trail (one of my favorite biking trails) was built upon. This guy, who calls himself a ferro-equinologist (a railroad archaeologist), appears to have traveled over and retraced the entire route of the original railroad line which is no longer there, houses, weeds, the trail and the 21st century having crept up over it. He even created a mapelogue of it, just like I partially did. This ferro-equinologying stuff, by the way, is something that I've often dreamt of doing, and probably will do sometime in the near future.

He's also discovered and photographed various hard-to-notice artifacts of the original railway line that are still standing on or near the trail, such as old rails, rusty signs, signals, old stations, coal feeder trestles, etc. What's funny is that I have often passed and spotted many of these structures on the trail and always wondered about them.

Here's something else he's done on the website. He has some old pictures of the railroad line and based on those, he tries to figure out the locations of the train stations (long gone) in the current landscape. For example, here's a portion of the trail I was biking this saturday. It's in a village called Salford. He has this old black and white picture of the station in the village and a new current picture of the location, and matching the buildings in the background, he figured out where the station building used to stand. This is all very interesting stuff for me, a huge fan and a frequent user of this trail and also a certified railroad lunatic.

Probably not that interesting for you, though. Look at you, all wrapped up in your sunflower seeds and coconut trees.