Category: Railroad

  • Franklin Street Station

    The Franklin Street Station served the railroad from 1930 until 1981 when SEPTA diesel service ceased operations. From 1981 until 2013, the building sat vacant until BARTA acquired and refurbished the building for bus services. The plan was to alleviate overcrowded services at the BARTA Transportation Center located about a block away.  –Wikipedia Barta refurbished the building, but it…

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  • Berks County Christmas – Day 22 – Railroad Travel

    Before planes were the main means of traveling during the holidays, many people took trains. If you traveled as a passenger on the Reading Railroad, it would have been in a car like the one pictured below: Did you ever use the railroads to travel for the holidays?

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  • Spring Street Subway

    In 1909, the city leaders celebrated with much fanfare the opening of the Spring Street Subway, a rail bridge that eliminated a dangerous Reading Railroad crossing – first for pedestrians and later for cars. The Reading Railroad was well established in the area before city engineers considered building the subway. So to construct it, crews…

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  • Swinging Bridge to Reading’s Outer Station

    It was deemed the “Swinging Bridge” Built in 1874 by the same firm that designed the Brooklyn Bridge, Reading’s rail bridge was heavily used by pedestrians to get over the train yard to Reading’s Outer Station. According to this Reading Eagle article, The Outer Station, which stood off North Sixth Street, handled passenger and freight…

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  • Orange Car – Produce

    The Orange Car was a fresh fruit and produce business along the Schuylkill River waterfront in Reading PA. Specifically it was located at 30 N. Front Street, at the intersection of Front and Washington. It was right down from Stichter Hardware and Schindlebeck’s Coal Yard. All kinds of fresh fruit and produce were brought here…

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  • Reading Railroad – Sinking Spring – 1972

    Below are a few pictures of the main Reading Railroad line tracks that follow 422 out West, in Sinking Spring. These images were taken at the Woodrow Avenue crossing. Notice the old Sinking Spring school building in the background. Also the old station building before it’s restoration in the last image. FM Brown’s Sons (image…

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  • Linette Candies

    Linette Candies is a local chocolate candy company especially known for their “Betcha Life” candy bars. They used to be located at the building shown below at 105 Washington Street in Reading. At some point they moved to a larger location in Womelsdorf. According to yellowpages.com; Linette Quality Chocolates was founded in 1927 as a…

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  • Sinking Spring Station 1960

    Sinking Spring Railroad Station

    The Sinking Spring Station served as a major pedestrian stop for many decades. My grandmother, who grew up on Columbia Ave in the 40s and 50s has fond memories of catching trains to Hershey or into the city. By the 70s the Station house was in disrepair. Eventually the Sinking Spring Historical Society moved the…

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  • West Wyomissing Foot Bridge

    West Wyomissing Foot Bridge

    In West Wyomissing, there used to be a pedestrian foot bridge that connected Morwood Avenue to Penn Avenue. It was built by the Reading Railroad in the early 1920s to help commuters who lived in West Wyo to get to the trolly lines on Penn Ave easily. A nearby establishment was Queen of the Valley Diner…

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  • Keuscler’s Roost

    “Jacob Louis Kuechler was a man of the mountains. Indeed, he made his home and his livelihood in the rocks, trees and hollows on Mount Penn. Living alone, Kuechler had a well-earned reputation as a hermit. But he was far from a recluse. His homey cabin was a stop on the Mount Penn Gravity Railroad.…

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Berks Nostalgia