US 6: Trip 5: Day 7 (Scranton, Steamtown, Carbondale, Kids for Cash)

A dreary, gloomy, cool day that yielded a drizzly afternoon. At one point, while I drove around, it started sleeting. I thought I was late enough to avoid this sort of stuff, but Northeast Pennsylvania wanted to prove me wrong. It's 6pm now and it's still raining outside.

Nay Aug Park

The day started, as planned, at Nay Aug Park in Scranton. I drove up the hill, through the University of Scranton campus, and encountered a large hospital. Hospitals seem to be perpetually under construction, and this one was no different. A new wing was being added to the very dated-looking main building. In front of the construction area was a street lined with bagged meters with writing indicating that there was no parking between July and September of last year. Signs were posted claiming that only emergency room staff were allowed to park there. So I drove into what I thought was the park. This, however, was just another hospital parking area. The road dead-ended abruptly at a dump truck with two neon-suited workers, who looked at me just for a second as I approached.

I turned around and found a place to park on another street behind another vehicle, where I assumed it was safe and legal to park. This was just a few feet from the entrance to the Davis Trail. The Davis Trail is the main feature of Nay Aug Park and follows the rim of the Roaring Brook Gorge. The path is in good condition and provides mostly tree-obscured views of the river and railroad below, as well as the interstate across the gorge.


The railroad leaves the gorge via tunnel	Ice still coats the edges of the gorge	Christmas lights stand in a parking area/storage area

A few meters later was a split in the trail, with one side heading down to a medium-sized waterfall and the other continuing along the gorge ridgeline. The waterfall was very pretty, but the closer viewpoint was not really accessible due to a thick, solid sheet of ice that encompassed the landing and 3-4 stairs leading up to it.

The waterfall was a nice surprise. Overall, this was a really beautiful and peaceful park.


Ice on the landing	Waterfall from above	Waterfall from treehouse

The keystone of the park is the treehouse, which, as it implies, sits on top of a tree high above the gorge, connected to the rim and the Davis Trail by a meandering walkway, also connected to several trees. The treehouse was installed in 2007, and still appears to be in excellent connection. Graffiti is at a relative minimum, and the structure, overall, is tastefully done.


Treehouse at Nay Aug Park	Recreation of the "Scranton: Electric City" sign on the Electric Building	A lone chair sits overlooking the unused "summer" portion of the park

A walk through the neighborhood by the park and back to the car. On the drive back down the hill, I took a street through the back of the University of Scranton campus, Ridge Row, that sounded interesting on Google Maps. It gives quite a view of the city below. There are several places where you can stop and get great shots of Downtown Scranton.


Downtown Scranton	Radisson Lackawanna Station

The entrance to Steamtown National Historic Park is a small street off of Lackawanna Avenue. The street takes you under a railroad overpass and curves back up around the trolley museum and into the parking lot. I found out, in looking at the map, that the railroad overpass is actually part of the national park. This may be so that the NPS can maintain the bridge's historic character.

The movie

The park sits on the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western (Lackawanna) Railroad shop complex, which mostly did repairs to steam locomotives. The railroad mainly served the area's anthracite coal mines which, in turn, fueled steam trains. The former roundhouse has been split into several parts of the park, with the visitors center on the west side, while the active train repair shop sits on the north side. The visitors center features several interpretive sign walls detailing the history of the Lackawanna Railroad.
In lieu of admission, I bought the annual America the Beautiful federal lands pass. I had decided that, based on what I planned on doing on this road trip, but also for the rest of the summer, it made sense to pay the $80 here instead of the $7 for just this park. The lady staffing the visitors desk was a volunteer and, for whatever, could not accept admission, so she had to call a ranger down from the office each time someone came in to pay. The ranger came down and was told that I wanted a pass. I made a number of jokes, but it was only when I said "I probably won't be back through here for a while," in response to the desk staffer's offer of the excursion schedule, that the ranger laughed. I got the idea that Scranton was not the ideal assignment for a national park ranger.
I was directed to watch an 18-minute movie as introduction to the park. The movie was sub-titled and dubbed, but the dubbing was awful. It was obviously geared toward train enthusiasts, as they used the steam locomotive sequences the same way low-budget soft porn uses the "girl taking off the bra" sequences. The story was about a sexually-frustrated man's attempt to gain the attention of a fictional woman from an advertising campaign, and his eventual failure at his life.

The station master was the only
one, of all the characters, sitting

After that, I had about 12 minutes before the 11am tour started. The schedule online indicated that the tour began at 10:30, but I guess that's not the case. I took the opportunity to explore the history museum. The history museum features memorabilia from the Lackawanna Railroad, but also re-creations of stations, waiting rooms and cars that you can walk through. There, I found out that a mail car is just as uninteresting as you would expected it to be.

Maybe the station master was
sitting because he wanted to beat
up that hobo SO bad

There were also a number of statues supposedly representing railroad characters. They included a delightful dirty hobo and a "tycoon," who stood in a sort of embarrassed and modest way at the back. I assume this statue was there to appeal to those who've played the game Railroad Tycoon. I've only played the original version, but only in demo mode. You're only allowed 36 stations in that version, so it really does not last very long. It's also not terribly realistic, but I played the second version and found it too complex.


	Inside the demonstration train car	Masturbating on a train in the 1940's

Cross-section of a steam locomotive

Lathe used to size the train wheels

Back at the visitors center building, I found the tour guide chatting with the admissions woman, who quickly scurried away as a I approached. I asked him if he was the tour guide, and it quickly became clear that this was going to be an odd tour. The guide did not give his name, but asked how much I knew about steam locomotives. "Almost nothing," I said, hoping I'd get some sort of "That's alright, you'll learn more that way" but he instead went into a rambling commentary on the engine shop repair crew and how he got people coming in from all over the country. What's strange about that - and he mentioned it three times during the tour - was that the one other person on the tour with me obviously had an accent, but the guide never asked him where he was from. I asked: Australia. I always peg Australians as New Zealanders and New Zealanders as Australians because I just can't differentiate the accents. I think I need an Australian "Flight of the Conchords" so that I can hear the accent more often, since I'm not big on the "Mad Max" franchise, or other Australian classic films.

Used to remove "tires" from wheels

But the guide just talked and talked. He would stop often and ask if we had questions, but he had mentioned several times that he didn't have time to stop for long because it was too close to lunch. Again, this was the tour that was supposed to have started at 10:30am, according to the NPS web site, but was instead starting at 11 for unknown reasons.

This has to be the only Department
of the Interior railroad truck: a truck
that's equipped to ride on rails and
the road

I like railroads. I like learning about routes, scheduling and why it was as it was. However, I don't think I'm really a "train geek" of any sort. I had always wondered what it was that the true train geek got excited about. From the guide's talking, I guess it's how the parts fit together. Rivets, bolts, pins, and the machines used to make them all work. That's what he was excited about. This is probably about as exciting as it seems to you as it was to me though. I tried to play along as best I could, but the tour kept devolving into stories about the repairmen trying to line up pieces of the locomotive. What type of locomotive it was and what it was used for was never discussed.

This picture kinda sums up the tour

The tour afforded the opportunity to go inside and see the shop though, where visitors were not normally allowed for liability and safety concerns. Honestly, there are a lot of really, really dangerous machines back there, all of which are hooked up and easy to start, so I totally understand this.

One of the repairmen

But it allowed a look at an otherwise unseen section of the park. It doesn't feel like the national park; it feels like a machine shop. The only difference here that makes the whole significant is that they're working on historic locomotives and doing it for the National Park Service.

The "tables" were of interest to me. These are platforms that support locomotives so that they can be worked upon. The locomotive rolls onto a flat, raised platform that's separated from the rest of the floor, and can be moved around and redirected. There was one in particular that included a very large pit where the locomotives could be worked on, their "trucks" (the section which houses the wheels) could be removed, or they could just be seen from the bottom in (relative) safety. Something to me has always been so scary about trains. Maybe just that they're so large and can cause death for you in so many different ways. Maybe just that they're so loud. I can recall a couple of times as a kid in Georgetown, Texas getting too close to a train as its whistle blew and just being terrified by it.


While I was being told about bolts and pins, I noticed the Christmas reef that they hang on the holiday trains sitting above me	Illustration on how to safely rape a box	The arc is shy...

Beginning of the US 6 freeway:
Lackawanna Valley Industrial Hwy.

Back on the road, I chose to make up at least a small portion of the road between Scranton and Milford by driving US 6 northeast from its junction with Interstate 81 north of Scranton to Waymart, just east of Carbondale, then back on today's Business US 6 through Carbondale to I-81. US 6, today, is a full-fledged expressway from I-81 to just north of Carbondale. Here, the mileposts do not add up and only correspond to the length of the freeway. They start from 0 at I-81 and end at around 15.5, after which they take up Business US 6's mileage, which is the real mileage for US 6 across Pennsylvania. My theory here is that this freeway section of US 6 is intended to eventually be an interstate spur route (a three-digit interstate, like nearby Interstate 380), so the mileage is just based on that.

US 6 milepost

The freeway is new and mostly straight. There are a number of exits where truck are prohibited and warned to use a specific detour to reach their destination. The reason for this is clear if you look to the west, where the Upper Lackawanna Valley stretches out far below you. Much of the route is very scenic as a result, and there is a scenic pull-off on the southbound side. This opened in 1999 (source). Prior to that, US 6 ran on what is known as the Scranton-Carbondale Highway, which also bypasses most of the towns in the Upper Lackawanna Valley.

The freeway section ends very abruptly and becomes a two-lane, undivided road. It intersects Business US 6 in an uncontrolled intersection, then makes the ascension over High Knob to cross the Moosic Mountains and leave the valley toward Waymart. Both sides of the ascension to High Knob include truck/passing lanes. The posted limit for trucks on this section is 25, while the regular speed limit is 45.


View of the Upper Lackawanna Valley	Warning signs for trucks	End of the freeway near Carbondale

Waymart is notable for two things: Ladore Lodge and Farview Hospital. These two things are quite big considering the size of Waymart, which is barely a dot on a map.

Ladore Lodge has been run by the Salvation Army since 1967, mostly as a Christian youth camp. However, they seem to be marketing it as a corporate or religious retreat site now. It sits to the southeast of the small town on a side street that goes off into the country. There appeared to be very little going on when I drove by on the cold, rainy day, though the parking lot was half-full and there two women sitting outside one of the side doors smoking cigarettes.

You will not find signs for Farview Hospital. In fact, I only looked it up and found it after I saw the buildings, which are only visible from the Carbondale-Waymart Road. US 6 avoids the center of Waymart, but existed on this other routing, through Waymart, as late as 1956. The structures of Farview just scream "State Hospital" or, at least "State School." That industrial, red brick Victorian gloom that is characteristic of these facilities all over the country. Farview no longer exists - it's been known as the State Correctional Institute at Waymart since 1995 - but it has a standing reputation detailed in several books, most notably Cold Storage by Wendell Rawls, Jr. The book was published in 1980 and is out of print. I plan to read it soon, but it apparently details the human rights atrocities common in mental institutions in the mid-20th century.

Abandoned hotel at Carbondale.
I could find little information on this,
but it was home of The Daily Grind,
a coffee shop that existed as late as
1999.

Carbondale was sad, but made sadder by the number of abandoned buildings in town. There were two large abandoned schools, an abandoned hotel, a large abandoned hospital and a few, scattered abandoned homes. It was bustling though, with both car and street traffic. I found the historic city hall building, which housed city offices and the police department, but also the town's historical society. No one was around as I walked up to the third floor, and I found the office closed, but there were a number of historic photos, old maps and other memorabilia posted on the wall.
Carbondale is most famous for its gravity railroad, which operated from 1825 to 1899 to carry coal from here to Honesdale.
Below are selected pictures of Carbondale, and the former routing of US 6, the Scranton-Carbondale Highway, now Business US 6. I plan to come back to this later to write a bit more, as I have yet to touch on my trip last night to Tunkhannock for the screening of Kids for Cash, a documentary on a recent judicial scandal in nearby Wilkes-Barre.