52nd Street is a closed railroad station in the West Philadelphia section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) at the junction of its Main Line and its Schuylkill Branch. Today, these lines are the SEPTA Regional Rail Paoli/Thorndale Line and Cynwyd Line, respectively.
At 52nd Street, the Main Line is on an embankment at-grade, while the Schuylkill Branch is on an elevated structure including a Parker through truss spanning 388 feet (118 m) over the Main Line on an extreme skew. A lit sign informed inbound passengers which platform the next train to Center City, Philadelphia would depart from.
Through merger and bankruptcy, the station and the trains serving it passed from the PRR to the Penn Central to Conrail, which abandoned all service to the station in 1980. Proposals have been made to reopen the station, either in conjunction with projects such as the Schuylkill Valley Metro, or as part of community revitalization efforts.
Famous quotes containing the words street and/or railroad:
“The American father ... is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)