South Hills Junction

[Donald Galt]

Just a general observation WRT to Jim's latest comments:

I do suspect that the city topo map fails to show a lot of crossovers - for 
example, there are none whatever indicated within the yards. And, logically, 
if the draftsman had been a little careless or was working with insufficient 
information, this is the sort of thing he would most likely have missed.

Therefore, I'm willing to accept that there probably would have been a 
connection from the single track on the south side of the triangle to the 
outbound 38/39/40/42 even though it isn't shown on the map.

> the 1927 map still lists this as the Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon R.R. and
> it connects directly to the South Hills tunnel - not the Haberman loop - a
> rather tight loop even for a narrow gauge RR!  Didn't the railroad go out  
> long before 1927? 

Don't know when it disappeared (and your quote from the ERA article 
doesn't go that far) but P&CS is still a separate entity in the Arnold Report, 
1910, at which time it would have been connected to the South Hills tunnel - 
though it could have gone either way whether the connecting line would be 
built by P&CS or PRCo. We'll have to ask Dr. Ed about this one.

You do see the remnant of the old P&CS line, Jim? - only 100 yards or so 
missing north of Warrington just east of the junction with the new line, with 
the old formation apparently obliterated by the new. Likewise, the route up 
to the P&CS tunnel site can be traced in the contours and property lines.

If anybody is interested, I can post a portion of the 1927 map as a JPEG file 
(or files, even for a portion. The whole sheet would run to far too many 
megabytes.)

D2