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.
This early view card dates from the era when Manheim, PA boasted a fringed depot hack that met all trains. Passengers gather trackside as a Reading bound train steams into town. The shirt sleeved hack driver awaits to convey potential hotel guests to the "Summy House" or to Manheim's "Washington House."
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.
The last Cornwall Railroad passenger run stands in front of the Reading's Manheim station on January 23, 1929. The Cornwall's old No. 2, originally named, "Castle Fin," pulled the final train from Manheim to Lebanon.
A by-stander confers with the engineer of Cornwall No. 2 just before the last train pulled out of Manheim over the "Joint Line," to Lebanon on January 23, 1929.
A formal portrait of the combination freight and passenger station at Manheim which served both the Reading and Columbia as well as the Cornwall Railroad. Built in 1882, it remained an agency station until 1976. The structure is still standing in 1983. Photo, Edward Lewis, Morrisville, Vt.
