The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

This is another section of the Montour Trail, a subject about which I’ve been talking about quite a lot in recent posts. This one is in or near Cecil Township, a community just north and west of HQ, and about a 25 minute drive for me.

Semi rural, the surrounding municipality has a ‘small town feel’ to it. Their Veterans of Foreign Wars hall has a Sherman Tank sitting in the parking lot, which is something I’ll definitely try to get a couple of shots of, next time I’m up this way. At one point, I saw a horse farm.

As always, I had the camera with me, but didn’t have terribly high hopes for anything photogenic going on. I was going for a short walk, and some alone time with an audiobook.

This time around, it was an audio play dramatizing ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I had downloaded this one years ago, and it has since become part of audible.com’s collections.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Montour Trail, which is a ‘rail to trail’ implementation of public space that takes advantage of an abandoned ‘right of way,’ formerly maintained by a now defunct rail company, is paralleled by an active right of way used by the MarkWest outfit.

MarkWest is, amongst other things, a shale gas recovery company (aka fracking, I’m told), which operates an active railway track that’s right next to the Montour. This track is used to move RR tanker cars full of a material described on the side of the cars as ‘liquified petroleum gas/ non odorized,’ which is newly harvested gas and shale oil that’s being held under extreme pressure for transport.

I didn’t have much hope for seeing a train on this day, I’d mention, but as stated – my purpose here was getting some exercise and to go exploring for a bit.

That trestle above is part of the Markwest short line’s right of way.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I think that the water flowing alongside the Montour is called ‘Miller’s Run.’ A run, as I understand the term, is defined as being bigger than a creek or stream in terms of water volume. During the spring thaw, these runs can become torrents.

Conventional wisdom, as offered to me by the locals, is that you should think twice before deciding to buy property on a street which has the word ‘run’ in its name, as you’ll inevitably have to deal with flooding sometime in the future.

This surrounding area was positively bucolic, I’d mention, with vast fields of wild vegetation, dressed in their seasonal funerary attire. What looked to me like acres of wetlands were framed in by large plots of residential land, and I even saw a horse farm along the route.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The Montour Trail splits into separate branches here, and I walked along both of them for a spell. The rail trestle pictured above overflies what looked like the Main Street of a town, whereas in the other direction the trail passes by an active rail switching yard, used by the Markwest people.

After walking over the trestle, I doubled back to the junction between the two branches and headed down the rail oriented one.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In the distance, I heard a certain sound, even over the headphones which I was listening to that Night of the Living Dead dramatization on, and realization of what was causing the sound saw me quickly reversing my direction so that I could get to a more photogenic spot.

While rapidly scuttling along, I converted the camera’s settings to ‘capture a rapidly moving and enormous object on tracks.’ Actuation of the camera’s many autofocus settings was accomplished, switching from a one shot setting scenario over to one that offered continuous autotracking, with a preference for building sized vehicles.

The engine rumble, and it began to manifest itself long before I heard a ‘steel on steel, worst sound around’ high pitched squeal.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Lucky, lucky narrator. Choo-Choo’s.

More on that tomorrow.

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