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(erielack) Boy Scouts clean up turntable pit in Boonton

I got it.  "Good news" story.

Boy scouts put muscle into Grace Lord Park
20 Troop One scouts clear 35,000 pounds of debris from four-foot deep pit
in Boonton
BY NAVID IQBAL
DAILY RECORD

BOONTON - The old locomotive turntable pit at Grace Lord Park where steam 
engines were spun around 180-degrees, was for years a dumping ground for
things like car parts, tires, tiles and sewer pipes.  That is until
Saturday when 20 scouts and family members from Boy Scout Troop One of
Boonton emptied out nearly 35,000 pounds - or six mason dump truckloads - 
of debris from the four-foot deep pit, Peter Guerlain the troop committee 
chairman, said.  "We just decided that cleaning up this site would be a
good community service project," Guerlain said. 

Camping at the site from the day before, the scouts wanted to start the
project Friday afternoon. but they spent a large part of the day under
tents as they waited for the rain to stop, Guerlain said.  In the
meantime, Guerlain said they got a history lesson and presentation on the
site from a railroad historian and an official with the Morris County Park
Commission. The scouts also got a lesson on the geology of the area they
were camping on from the New Jersey Geological Survey.  "We're apparently
on a fault 
line," Guerlain said. "I was joking with my son that he was sleeping on
one side of it while I was on the other. This cleanup basically turned out
to be like an archeological dig.  We're learning, getting some history. 
We're keeping pieces that may have been part of the original structure."

The turntable pit was built in the 19th century because locomotive engines

couldn't move backwards and they needed a way to turn around, according to
material the historians left the scouts.  The conductor would balance the
engine on a beam in the center of the pit.  The beam was then spun by hand
around a track.  Remnants of the original structure - neatly stacked
stones placed around the 30-foot wide circle and cut at nearby quarry -
remained after more than a century.

As the Rockaway River rambled below, several scouts and other volunteers, 
including one as young as four, gathered the debris in buckets and carried
it over to a dump truck, provided by the municipal public works
department.  The driver took the contents to the other side of the river
where it was discarded in the town dump.  The noise of the heavy pieces of
tile falling in the dump could be heard all the way across the river at
the site of the cleanup.

Fifteen-year-old Billy Matarazzo of Boonton was among the boy scouts at
work Saturday afternoon.  His arms and face was covered with mud as he
gathered pieces of sewer pipe and threw them in a bucket.  As he picked
through the debris, he found a rearview mirror for a car, that a scout
leader said looked like it belong to a car from the 1950s.

Matarazzo said his back was sore and he had a couple of cuts on his hands.
 But apparently the work was worth it.  "I know that I'm helping out the
community by cleaning this stuff up," he said.  Matarazzo admitted though
that he doesn't work this hard to clean up his bedroom. 

Gary R. Kazin
DL&W Milepost R35.7
Rockaway, New Jersey

http://www.geocities.com/gkazin/index.html


		
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