Another immersive experience is a tour of the railroad's shop complex, which served as the heart of its operation. Seemingly immune to time's sweep, it appears exactly as it did a century ago. The silver smokestacks mark the location of the Babcock and Wilcox boilers, which provided the steam needed to run the belt-driven equipment, while the red-painted buildings consist of the blacksmith Women's Packers Jerseys, car, machine, and carpentry shops, pattern house, foundry, and lumber shed. According, again, to Vagel Keller, "Another persistent myth holds that the current shops and roundhouse were built to replace earlier structures destroyed by a fire in 1882.
The fire myth is based on oral traditions that conflate a cyclonic windstorm in the fall of 1881, which blew down part of the roundhouse (surviving today as the four arched doorways on the eastern half of the present structure), and on a fire in the early 1900s, which destroyed the paint shop and adjacent boiler shop. The roundhouse you see today originated with the four eastern stalls in 1874, was expanded to six stalls by 1895, and to its present form after 1911. The current shop complex originated in 1882 after the superintendent of the railroad prevailed on the Board of Directors to authorize the purchase of machine tools. Like the roundhouse, the shops were expanded over the years, taking their present form by 1911."
Sharing the dual-gauge portion of the rails in the yard across from the East Broad Top depot, the Rockhill Trolley Museum, billing itself as "Pennsylvania's first operating" one, affords the visitor a second opportunity to sink himself into vintage transportation history, plying the track to cover distance while distancing himself from time. Powered by 600 volts of direct current collected by a continuous, overhead copper wire by means of a sliding shoe positioned at the end of a pole, electric trolleys, like trains, run on tracks, each of their under-floor motors usually powering a pair of wheels. An electric motor-driven air compressor channels pressure to their brakes. Internally, conductors check tickets and collect fares.
Tracing their origins to horse-drawn cars, trolleys, in their earliest forms, were small, wooden, four-wheeled vehicles, providing inter-city transportation. Demand, paralleling metropolis growth, soon necessitated larger cars, later constructed of steel, for passenger, freight, and mail transport, and by 1918, the trolley transportation industry had become the country's fifth-largest. Pennsylvania alone was served by 116 such trolley lines, which covered more than 4,600 miles of track.
But, as cities stretched, like taffy, into suburbs and were increasingly accessed by roadways, need for this transportation system declined, leaving only Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to run their lines after 1960, when Johnstown became the last small urban area to cease using its own. Because it offers an inexpensive, pollution-free alternative to inner-city transportation, some existing track and related system components have been restored Packers pro shop, which could be considered a budding stage of resurgence, modern cars or light-rail vehicles once again crisscrossing streets, intermixed with individual car and bus traffic.
