Horseshoe Curve

After visiting Canoe Creek State Park, we decided to go see another nearby spot I've been wanting to visit for ages, the Horseshoe Curve. My parents spent many happy years diving into the absorbing hobby of being amateur railroad historians.  So although I'd never been there, I somehow always assumed that the Horseshoe Curve is a landmark celebrated from coast to coast.  It's actually pretty cool and probably should be.

We arrived on the final day of the visitor center being open to the public until March 2019, so we were excited to have a chance to see it. The Horseshoe Curve was constructed in 1854 entirely by hand, as the solution to a daunting engineering problem.  In a nutshell, it stretches out an elevation gain over a long distance, making the job of climbing it much more realistic for heavy freight trains.  It's still in constant use, with approximately 50 trains rolling through per day.  I hoped we'd be lucky enough to see one come through while we were there. We actually got to see four, including two that came through while we were up at track level. From this vantage point it was possible to see a very long freight train stretched from one end of the curve to the other. Stairs lead up to the track level, but they were closed, most likely because no one really wanted to shovel the snow. Instead we took the funicular, which has two cars and a unique one-track design. In the middle, there is a split so cars can pass each other. The funicular cars are made to look like Pennsylvania Railroad cars.

If you want to see the Horseshoe Curve from the perspective of a train, you will need to take Amtrak train the "Pennsylvanian", which passes by going to New York City once a day, and to Pittsburgh once a day. (If you wanted to take it the entire way, Amtrak has it scheduled to take about 9 1/2 hours, vs. driving which is optimally 6 1/2 hours.) There are sadly no excursion trains just for sightseers that return you quickly to a local train station. But the prospect of a scenic journey to NYC without a car to bother with does sound pretty tempting...

A scale model of the landscape before the Horseshoe Curve was constructed.

A scale model showing what the land looked like after construction. I thought this was an ideal way to really get across the scale of what they accomplished.

Looking up at the top funicular station.

If you look closely, you will see the passing freight train stretching to either end of the curve.