Montour Railroad


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  • Gene P. Schaeffer: This wonderful Saturday morning I visited Montour #4. With boots on, I walked from the Montour bridge at the West End of Montour #4 where bicycles were hidden many years ago while railroading the Montour, East towards the location of #4's tipple. I guess I found the mine car Tim mentioned earlier that was dislodged during Ivans havoc. Attached is a photo of it taken from the guard rail along ValleyBrook. Unless your out of your car and walking along Valley Brook, this car is directly below the hillside. Does anyone out there in Montour land have access to a tow truck or backhoe? This mine car is perhaps 15 feet long, has 1 wheel missing is directly below Valley Brook. A tow truck or backhoe could easily pull this mine car up to the highway for placement onto a flatbed and transported somewhere along the trail and displayed. The other 5 mine cars would be easy to salvage if permission could be obtained. The wheels to these mine cars are independently bolted to the underside frame of each car. I have some detailed photos of the one car if any one is interested... Thanks to Dave Oyler and Stan Sattinger for sharing this with all of us.
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  • Dennis Sims: Mine cars in the creek alongside Valleybrook Road just downtream from where the Montour #4 Tipple was located . Back in the early 90s while driving on ValleyBrook Road, I happened to notice the mine cars alongside the creek on the opposite bank of the road. I thought it would be nice to recover one and restore and set it up along the Trail somewhere. So, I put on the hip boots and waded down the creek from Bridge and shot some slides and to check out the feasibility of doing such. There was restoration work taking place on the old mine site at the time. Now I am not sure if these could be the same cars that could have been washed out and relocated in some of the floods that occurred on Brush Ruin or are different cars. Dave's picture shows the cars on the bank adjacent to the road. I cannot recall if there were such cars further downstream. To mark the location, this slide was taken to show the mine building and the retaining wall along Valley Brook Road. These cars were found at the end of the wall.
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  • Close view of the partially overturned cars.
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  • Mine Cars
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  • Mine Cars
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  • A close up of the exposed car,
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  • David Oyler: I took a walk this weekend along the West Peters (future) trail section. On my return to the Arrowhead parking lot I passed five coal mine cars along the bank of Brush Run (the creek paralleling Valley Brook Road). Originally I thought that these were half buried in the bank, but from the photo it actually looks more like they were set along the bank at creek level and then filled with earth, or perhaps rock. The photo only shows three complete cars and part of a fourth because I don\'t have a wide angle lens. The cars are located a little less than 0.1 mile north (west) of the old brick building with the oil company signs on the trail side of the creek. Ned says the building is an old mine building. My topo maps indicate that there was a shaft located on the site, perhaps (this is conjecture) in the same building. I also saw another mine car upstream of the five in the bank, but I can\'t remember exactly where I saw it, and still another car downstream in the creek, flipped over with the wheels visible.
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