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.
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.
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.
Next time it is onto Plane 8.
