PRR Main Line Signal Documentation Summary

On Nov 25th I am going to be presenting my work to document the PRR Main Line signaling between CP-HARRIS and CP-PENN at my local NRHS chapter meeting.  While the project unofficially started in 2009 and gained urgency in 2012 and beyond, the bulk of the photos were taken starting in 2014.  While I was not able to document everything I wanted to or even everything I would have been able to document assuming perfect planning I am happy with my work and I figured I should present a summary of the results here.

I will be using terms like Fully Document, Partially Document and Survey.  These mean got photos of all components of a signal location, only some of the components and then only photos from a passing train.



The Pittsburgh Line has a total of 38 Conrail era interlockings of which I was able to fully document 22, partly document 6 and survey 10.  The biggest misses were CP-TUNNEL, CP-MG and CP-SO.  CP-MARY, CP-AO, CP-JW and CP-W had all already been re-signaled to varying degrees and were simply not a priority.

The Pittsburgh Line has 82 main line signal locations of which I was able to fully document 38 with the remainder being surveyed, although when only counting position lit automatic signals I got 33 of 59.  I regrettably missed two signals on the track 3 turkey path between CP-C and CP-CONPIT entirely.  There are also 2 or 3 yard signal locations (2 at Altoona, one previously at Harrisburg) that were also missed.

  Total number of photos taken was around 14,000, including photos of trains and other Main Line infrastructure.  Remember this is just between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh and doesn't count work I have done on the Amtrak portion of the line.

The photos were compiled over 25 trips, 4 of which were surveys on Amtrak's Pennsylvanian, 2 of which I would consider failures.  There was an additional trip on a fall foliage special that allowed me to cover the Rockville wye.  The other 20 trips were of the road trip variety, two doing double duty for Buffalo Line photos.  Six were trips to Pittsburgh.  Four were trips to Clarion, PA.  Three were dedicated Altoona trips and the other seven day trips along the Middle Division, often involving the always wonderful HARRIS tower.  Arguably my first trip on this series was the one I took to ALTO tower in 2004 so that would make this a 15 year effort.

All these numbers are probably off by a few, but they are the best I can figure without a full blown audit.  I plan to do a live stream of my presentation sometime on or about Nov 22rd to practice and content and see how it goes for time (Draft presentation stream can be found here).