Re: EBT hoppers and urban myths *LINK*

I can't emphasize enough what bad shape the EBT hoppers in PA are in.
My son and I spent two days following the line 3 years ago. Mt Union yard in one of the strangest spots I have ever visited. You enter from a McDonalds parking lot, into a grove of trees. You find an engine house with three rail tracks leading to it. Inside is a standard gauge loco, sitting unused since 1956. Dirty windows prevent viewing. As you follow the tracks deeper into the forest you find yourself in a railroad yard, with trees growing between and through the ghostly hoppers and occasional boxcar. The environment is strangely like a overgrown Mayan ruin. Tracks while still in place are decrepit and would likely fail under use. It is difficult to get across tracks... the underbrush is too dense. The hoppers are full of leaf mold, and fast returning to their iron oxide roots. You can see through the side panels. Occasionally you find a spot, one hopper long, without a car. These are where the cars, now on the White Pass or the Cumbres and Toltec once stood. In a few cases a car now lays on its side were it was rolled over to allow access to the trucks, sold to some tourist line for further use.
If you take the time to look at old photographs it is impossible to correlate the scene before you with the gritty industrial images of the past. Today, what was once a railroad yard is a second growth forest.
Leaf mold and acid bearing coal residue have reduced the remaining EBT hoppers to iron oxide. A 3000 class boxcar in a junk yard in Alamosa is in better shape.