I see many of the recent posts are about the timetables in the 50s & 60s..............
I used to deadhead to Binghamton in the late 60s to cover fireman/engineer jobs on the Syracuse division. I'd drive to Scranton from my home in West Pittston, park at the roundhouse or in the old Laurel Line parking lot & walk to the station. Once there, I'd go upstairs & walk to the dispatchers office on the mezzanine & ask the dispatcher (usually Charley Kopechny) how #5 was doing. She usually was long out of Stroudsburg and sometimes was already on the right hand CTC board at Moscow or Elmhurst. I'd chat for a while, watching the little lights blink on on the board as The Lake Cities got closer then take a leisurely walk back down the stairwell to the main floor to board the train.
One night I found a pile (about 20) of DL&W passenger timetables on the stair landing & put them in my grip to be reviewed later. (You'd often see outdated stuff on the landing that the clerks hadn't gotten around to putting in a wastebasket during the day - once I found a Westinghouse catalog from 1910 or so describing interurbans & freight motors for sale with lots of fotos. It was probably some of the Laurel Line paper the DL&W inherited.)
When I got around to looking at the old TTs, I noticed that all them had color covers of The Phoebe Snow Westbound in the Delaware Water Gap. I tossed them in the closet & would look at them from time to time. I finally realized that in the ones on the bottom of the pile, the locomotives only had 2-axle trucks instead of 3-axle like the E-8s. WOW, THESE were really old. I showed them to the owner of a rare book store on the square in Scranton & he gave me 25c each for the ones with the E-8s & 50c each for the ones with the Fs on the cover. What a deal!!!! Anybody have an idea what these are worth nowadays???? At the time I thought it was great.
Regards to all,
Walter E. Smith
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