Geigertown Central Railroad

02/05/2025

12/22/2020

Added new doors to the mack 4 engine

05/04/2019

https://jbritton.pennsyrr.com/index.php/tpm/196-prr-clearance-car-497125

PRR Middle Division in HO Scale

10/01/2015

at this time there is no web site for the railroad.

09/30/2015

A drone trip around GCRR. View in HD

09/29/2015

06/10/2015

A neat piece of RR history can be found at Geigertown RR. The "Clearance Car #497125" was built at the Altoona Works in Altoona, PA in 1950.
It was a specially designed, 3 man operated RR car for the purpose of accurately measuring the distance above or adjacent to the tracks of objects such as bridges, tunnels, stations and rock cuts above or adjacent to the tracks.
I found a site with a story written by the last surviving crew member of CC #497125 referred to as KTH (Jan 2015)
"As far as I know, I am the only surviving crew member on the Clearance Car. I started on the Penn Central 7/1/75 as a Draftsman on the Clearance Car and then Assistant Clearance Engineer. To my fading memory there were 103 rods. There were legs under the main rods that came down to measure side structure such as Dwarf signals starting at 6" above top of rail. The Radius section would lift about 5 of 6 feet for overhead structures such as bridges and tunnels to about 20 feet. Anything higher than that and I would have to climb up on the roof through a hatch and measure with an expanding measuring rod to 25 feet......which was ok until the night we were measuring the overhead walkway at Sing Sing Prison and as I was there at 2 AM all of the Prison lights came on and I had about 10 guards with machine guns pointed at me.....All I could do at that point was a little tap dance in the spotlights and then go change my shorts. At that time we had a 3 man crew: Jim Ormsby, Clearance Engineer, Myself and Fred Smith. The Clearance Car pretty much finished it's run late 1977 as Conrail was in the process of trying out Hi-Rail Clearance cars. I drew up the concept of what we would need for a Hi-Rail Clearance Truck and that was in use for several years before they went to a laser measuring Hi-Rail Car. It is possible that the Hi-Rail Clearance Truck is parked in a MW yard in Easton PA. It was fun seeing pictures of this after almost 40 years and it brought back many memories of all of the Cities and small towns that we passed through, some of which we stayed in for in some cases weeks at a time."
If interested, the complete history and detailed explanation of this clearance car can be found at Archive.is-
https://archive.is/eOCkT

04/05/2015

Anybody is welcome to post pictures on here from your visit

11/18/2014