Lines
The current line runs from 69th Street Terminal just west of the Philadelphia city line, west and north to Norristown, splitting from the original main line at Villanova Junction. Formerly, the P&W's main line went west to a terminus just east of Sugartown Road in Strafford, then later, another .47 mile further, on an extension providing transfer to the PRR Strafford station and a transfer track for freight trains. The Strafford Branch was abandoned in 1956; today, the Radnor Trail uses its old right-of-way from Radnor-Chester Road to Old Sugartown Road. Up until 1951, the P&W tracks connected with the Lehigh Valley Transit Company's Liberty Bell Route at Norristown, providing service straight through from Upper Darby to Allentown.
Interstate Commerce Commission valuation reports indicate that the railroad had interchange connections to the Pennsylvania Railroad at Millbourne Mills, Strafford and Swedeland.
The line was built as a double-track third rail line. Most structures on the line were designed to ultimately accommodate four tracks, but the added tracks were never built. The quality of the line was quite high, with no at-grade crossings, 2½% maximum grade, stone ballast, block signals, and 85 pound rail. The Norristown Branch, which opened on December 12, 1912, while only 6½ miles long, represented a significant construction challenge due to the high standards maintained on the line's design. The line had to cross 12 highways, the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Radnor, and ended in a single track steel bridge 3,800 feet long into Norristown. Some 400,000 cubic yards of earth, 200,000 cubic yards of stone, 25,000 cubic yards of masonry, and 2,700 tons of steel were used in its construction.
Read more about this topic: Philadelphia And Western Railroad
Famous quotes containing the word lines:
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
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O then if in my lagging lines you miss”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“... when I awake in the middle of the night, since I knew not where I was, I did not even know at first who I was; I only had in the first simplicity the feeling of existing as it must quiver in an animal.... I spent one second above the centuries of civilization, and the confused glimpse of the gas lamps, then of the shirts with turned-down collars, recomposed, little by little, the original lines of my self.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)