[PRCo] Re: Chartiers Southern (was: i don't know who E.T. Brashear was...)

[galtfd at comcast.net]

Not so scary as regards PennDOT. Maps don't show everything, and it's particularly unusual for a highway map to show the course of a railless railway. Scary, though, for how many decades we were limited to 1:62,500 topo up to half a century out of date.

At first I wondered whether 1976 had perhaps been a major redrawing of the highway map, but comparison with 1965 puts that to rest. Still, over some of the country, USGS publication at 1:24,000 hadn't been completed before the mid-1960s, so is it possible that this information wasn't yet available to highway department cartographers in 1965? Or maybe it's just that somebody in 1976 happened across the track of the old railway-that-wasn't and thought it would be cool to include it.

I have to say, though, that the enthusiasm with which I greeted the highway maps online was inspired by the depiction of this one railway on the 1976 map. That enthusiasm was severely dampened when I discovered, upon comparison with the aerial photos, how carelessly PRCo and West Penn were drawn on the 1940s-era sheets.

Don G

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Derrick J Brashear <shadow at dementia.org>
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, galtfd at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> > Okay, I still haven't looked at the 1965 edition, but the Chartiers Southern 
> isn't shown in 1957 either.
> >
> > So obviously the 1976 map incorporates new information, most likely from USGS 
> topos.
> 
> Scary, since that's not really new information :)
>