I don’t know much about Plane 8 aside from what I see in these images from May of 1970. They were all labeled “Foundations at Plane 8.” The last image is labeled, “bridge at foot of Plane 8.”
From a site called Wikimapia it shows that the bottom of the plane was at what was known as Muleshoe Curve. The Muleshoe was a relative of the more famous Horseshoe Curve, built in the 1850s and closed in 1981. The Muleshoe and the alignment of the portage railroad can be seen on this 1902 map of the Ebensburg quadrant topo map.
The National Park Service has a lengthy report on-line about the APRR. You can download it here. The report is from 1973 so I wonder if these excavations were part of the study.
Historical Topographic Map Collection
If any of this remains intact, let me know. There is a trail along the old railroad in this area and I am surprised not to find more on-line concerning it.
In addition photos of the engine house and Lemon House at Plane 6, the Earl Giles collection has some showing the incline in that late 1960s period.
This is dated October 1969
Many of the slides were labeled and with the trail off to the side, I am reasonably certain that this is Plane 6. It looks as if it had been cleared and then regrew a bit. Honestly today it doesn’t look too much different. I took this on my visit last October 2021. I was remarking that it would benefit from a trim with a good boom mounted mower.
There are a couple others in the collection that say they are Plane 6.
Dated October 1969.Dated June 1970.
I noticed in my own shots that it can be difficult to tell if you are looking uphill of down. Also in the collection was this shot showing a man measuring the distance between the sleepers along the plane.
This was dated February 1968, so it is possible that someone exposed the stones and then it all regrew or maybe they decided to re-bury them all. The first image in this post seems to capture that regrowth.
If you have been to the park, you know that at the bottom of the plane is the skew bridge. What is surprising is that the only pictures Earl had of the bridge were of older photos like this postcard image. That mark on the left edge seems to indicate that it was taken from some collection.
The skew bridge is where the old highway passed over the railroad. It was constructed on an angle (or skew) which is a feat of engineering on its own. Here is the skew bridge today.
Old Route 22 (a four lane highway) splits just uphill and goes around the bridge site. At the split is this monument to the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
And here is a view looking up the incline from the bridge. The Lemon House sits at the top of the hill/plane and the National Park Visitor’s Center is off to the right, a walk of about a half mile.
A little background- I saw a post on one of the canal-related social media sites asking if someone was willing to digitize a few hundred slides that the poster had recently purchased. I enjoy the sense of discovery that comes with scanning these old slides as these personal collections can contain some real treasures. Ray Hall, who was the new owner of the slides, offered to donate them to the ACS in return for a copy of the digital files. A box of slides arrived in a few days and we were off to the scanner!
Ray was able to provide me with the last name of the seller, a Mr. Giles, and he said that they had been taken by a canal/local historian from the Johnstown (PA) area. With this information, it was fairly easy to find that the collection belonged to Earl Giles. I found this article in The Daily News (Johnstown, PA) of July 8, 1968.
This article helped immensely as I was noticing that many of the slides had been labelled as ‘duplicate’ since Earl liked to trade. So now I knew that all the images were not his alone. However, the slides do point to Earl’s interests and that was the western division of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal with an especial interest in the Pack Saddle region along the Conemaugh River and the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Most of the slides dated from the late 1960s and early ’70s. All the 357 slides were scanned at 2400 dpi as tiff files. When that was done, I went back through and used GIMP to reduce the slides to 400 dpi Jpeg files.
The images were a mix of Earl’s original images taken out on his explorations and slides that he traded for showing the same. About half of the slides were his photographs of older photographs, postcards, and maps. So I sorted out what I thought was interesting and will share them here.
We will start with some images of the Staple Bend Tunnel (constructed 1831-1833) which is claimed to be the first railroad tunnel dug in the United States. (There were two canal tunnels dug prior.) The tunnel is located near Mineral Point, about 5 miles slightly northeast of Johnstown. To reach the tunnel you need to park and walk or ride a bike two miles along the old railroad bed (now a stone-dust path). This site was added to the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Sites in 2001.
When Earl and his fellow explorers visited it in the late 1960s it was certainly a bit more rugged a walk.
This is labeled as the east portal. Apparently much of the stonework had been removed and used elsewhere by 1907.This is an old postcard that might be the same as the one above showing the missing stone-work.These were dated 1968.
The planes were numbered from west to east along the APRR and the 901-foot-long tunnel sat at the head of Plane 1. The image below shows one of the explorers sitting on top of the tunnel portal looking west along Plane 1 and the Conemaugh River valley.
It would take ten planes to lift the canal boats over the mountains and in the next post, we will see the work at Plane 6.
