Coincidences.........

Sorry for lack of blog posts of late, but business is growing too fast and spend most of my waking moments trying to keep up.   An opportunity presented itself for a last minute weekend getaway this past friday.  Hastily planned, we resolved to go somewhere within a few hours driving distance that we haven't been before - difficult given that we mostly travel within a few hours of our house on our weekend getaways.   Since we like antique stores, I consulted the guides I keep on my desk and found a cluster of antique stores around Hagerstown, MD - Gettysburg, PA.  I'd been in the area before with my son when we used to do father and son Civil War battlefield trips when he was little, but never with my wife and not for shopping purposes.   About halfway there I got recalled that the regional NMRA convention was possibly in Hagerstown, although I also thought maybe Virginia, and I wasn't even sure which weekend.  Well it was this weekend and was in Hagerstown.  So I guess I could have gone, but since it was a last minute call,.....  

We had a great weekend - bought lots of industrial artifacts - ate mostly good food - and saw some new towns and villages.   I stopped at the Western Maryland RR Museum in Hagerstown  late Saturday afternoon after a jaunt down to West Virginia, and bumped into now fewer than 4 model railroaders I knew.   They probably think I've lost a few marbles with my explanation at how I ended up in Hagerstown the same weekend as the convention.

Besides the antiques, the posted photo's show a real neat find in the C&O Canal Park at Williamsport, MD.   This is probably one of the neatest little moveable railroad bridges I've ever found and it cries out for modeling.   The bridge was built by the Western Maryland Railroad in 1923 to access a newly built power plant built on the strip of land between the canal and the Potomac.  The canal was still in use at the time so the bridge had to be built in a way to allow clearance for both the canal boats and the mules and towrope pulling them.  This led to the unique configuration shown in the photos.  Ironically there was extensive flooding the winter after the bridge was completed and the canal never reopened.  The bridge was only raised a few times to protect it from later floods.  The spur was abandoned in the early 1970's when the plant switch to truck deliveries of coal.