The driver of P. R. Shellenberger's grocery wagon steadies his horse until things settle down as the Reading's Columbia bound passenger train disappears in the distance. The signals and the structure indicate that the station of Bruckharts in rural West Hempfield Township in that distand time had an agent or a signal operator who might well have been the woman in the long skirt.
A few minutes out of Columbia on a bleak November afternoon in 1940, Reading's No. 1642 with a Reading bound freight hits the crossing at Heise's Woods as it blasts up grade on a reverse curve ascending Chestnut Hill. In an earlier day, the Reading & Columbia had a picnic ground in the "woods," and ran picnic excursions one of which was for veterans just after close of the Civil War.
Any view of a passenger train on the Columbia end of the Reading's Reading & Columbia Branch are rare, but this one is even more so. It shows a double headed picnic special of the Columbia Merchants' Association headed for an outing at Hershey, PA in the early 1920's. Already on the steep grade up Chestnut Hill the engines are smoking things up. Faintly in the background is the old Janson rolling mill.
The spindly wooden trestle that carried the Reading, Marietta & Hanover branch across a low meadow area in West Hempfield Township was definitely a "no, no," for the Reading's heavier class engine. The view is looking north on Silver Spring Road.
