EBT 50th-anniversary celebration

The East Broad Top will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its 1960 reopening on Saturday, August 14, with its first scheduled mail run in over half a century, and with the return of the Rockhill Furnace post office to the EBT station, if only from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Rockhill postmaster, Jared Gontz, will hand-cancel mail with a commemorative postmark featuring an EBT steam engine, and then load the mail on a special 2 p.m. mail train. The railroad is planning carefully to make the event as memorable and photogenic as possible.

Besides the mail train, August 14 will offer reduced daytime coach fares—it's the railroad's annual Community Appreciation Day—and an evening train featuring a catered dinner at Colgate Grove. Plus that weekend will bring the yearly visit by Civil War reenactors—possibly as many as a couple of hundred of them, but that figure's not confirmed yet. The dinner train, which I think departs at 8, costs $35 for an all-you-can-eat meal. Reservations are required—call the station at (814)-447-3011 or e-mail office@ebtrr.com.

One other thing: No. 15 backed out of the roundhouse this past Saturday morning with No. 16's deep, rich whistle, and without tourist-era white trim on her tires and running boards. As I understand it, we're done with white trim for good.

-- Lawrence Biemiller


Night watchman Bud Gilland stands beside the coach track as No. 15 retrieves her train over the July 4 weekend.

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Lawrence Biemiller
Washington, D.C.