They've Been Workin' on the Railroad - Day 44

  I met these guys, Carl, Rick, Pat and Fritz at the road crossing where I stopped for lunch. Dick asked me how far I was hiking, and yes, he had heard of the North Country Trail! We ended up talking for a while, and then I realized they were carrying some hand tools to a storage building. I asked if they were working on the trail.

The answer was, "yes." They are volunteers with the Friends of the Little Miami State Park, and they are out there every Thursday working on projects! They gave me a 7-layer cookie bar, and I thanked them for all they do.

Their tool storage is in the lower level of this building. This has a "workin' on the railroad' history too. It's a signal tower/relay station. These were called "interlocking stations," and the operators had to manually set the train signals to prevent two trains being in the same "block." In other words... they prevented accidents when it was done right. Think stress level of an air traffic controller.

The very best work story along the rail trail today is the Peters Cartridge Factory. When I was last here, this beautiful building was in rougher shape. There was hope of converting it to apartments, but it had been declared a SuperFund site because of the lead. I never knew what happened after that.

Now, it IS apartments, and (I was told) a nice brewery.

The cartridges are shotgun shells. Gershom Moore Peters invented a way to machine load the shells in 1887. The factory was an important supplier of ammunition for WWI. This is only part of the complex.

The smokestack.

And the shot tower. The way perfectly round shot was/is produced was to drop molten lead through a seive inside a tower. It forms spherical balls as it falls, and is "caught" at the bottom in a pool of water.

Here's a reminder of the fact that everyone used to work "on" the railroad. There are several blocks of builings in Morrow that still face where the tracks were. That's where things happened.

And this working find tickled me no end! These abutments are the remnant of a coal dump station at the Peters Factory. A switcher could pull one or two cars of coal up a fairly steep ramp so that they were then elevated, and could be offloaded to waiting wagons or trucks. Notice how the tops of the abutments are about 6 feet higher than the rail bed.

Tomorrow will be my last few miles on the Little Miami Scenic Trail. Then I head east and the hills will get real. Denali and I are hiking separately for a few days until she gets up to speed.

Miles today: 14.9. Total miles so far: 631.7.

See Bridges