February 1978, a photographer found a clean view of a Delaware, Lackawanna and Western trailer still in reasonable shape in Moosic, Pennsylvania, one of many small neighborhoods between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Other profitable freight included dairy products, cattle, lumber, cement, steel, and grain.
The Pocono Mountains region was one of the most popular vacation destinations in the country—especially among New Yorkers—and several large hotels sat along the line in Northeastern Pennsylvania, generating a large passenger traffic for the Lackawanna. All of this helped justify the railroad's expansion of its double-track mainline to three and in a few places four tracks.
Phoebe Snow, mythical tourist who always wore white and never got them soiled on the Road of Anthracite, a clean burning coal
Phoebe Snow was a figure in an advertising campaign for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. She was an auburn-haired traveler who always wore a white dress, white hat and white gloves to promote the clean way to travel: By train.
The DL and W used anthracite coal as fuel instead of the soft coal which other train companies used. Anthracite, or hard coal, burned much cleaner, was dustless and was found in abundance in northeast Pennsylvania.
http://www.monroehistorical.org/phoebesnow.html
The Lackawanna owned vast anthracite mines in Pennsylvania, and could legitimately claim that the clothes of their passengers would remain clean after a long trip. (I jut read somewhere that they painted the train white to prove how clean burning the Anthracite was, but, I forgot to cut and paste the quote from the source, and the link)
To promote this, the Calkins advertising department created, "Phoebe Snow", a young New York socialite, and a frequent passenger of the Lackawanna.
The advertising campaign presented Miss Snow as often traveling to Buffalo, New York and always wearing a white dress.
Calkins said he based the campaign on an earlier series of Lackawanna car cards (advertisements displayed inside coaches) - All in Lawn - created by DL and W advertising manager, Wendell P. Colton.
They had been built on a rather limiting nursery rhyme, The House That Jack Built, and featured a nameless heroine dressed in white. For his new campaign, Calkins adopted a form of verse inspired by an onomatopoetic rhyme, Riding on the Rail, that he felt offered endless possibilities.
The original artwork was painted by Henry Stacy Benton, who worked from a series of images of a model, Marion Murray Gorsch.
Later, she was photographed in a variety of railroad activities while dressed in a white gown. Standing in for the cool, violet-corsaged Phoebe character of the paintings, Gorsch was one of the first models to be used in advertising.
So how about that... starting with a cool old railcar photo, I learned about one of the 1st models to be used in advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_Snow_(character)
Changes in the region's economy undercut the railroad, however. The post-World War II boom enjoyed by many U.S. cities bypassed Scranton and the rest of Lackawanna and Luzerne counties.
Oil and natural gas quickly became the preferred energy sources. Silk and other textile industries shrank as jobs moved to the southern U.S. or overseas.
The advent of refrigeration squeezed the business from ice ponds on top of the Poconos.
Even the dairy industry changed. The Lackawanna had long enjoyed revenues from milk shipments; many stations had a creamery next to the tracks.
Perhaps the most catastrophic blow to the Lackawanna, however, was dealt by Mother Nature. In August 1955, flooding from Hurricane Diane devastated the Pocono Mountains region, killing 80 people.
Hurricane Diane also caused the DL and W to abandon their Old Road/former Warren Railroad line due to severe damages that simply wouldn't be worth it to repair.
The floods cut the Lackawanna Railroad in 88 places, destroying 60 miles of track, stranding several trains (with a number of passengers aboard), and shutting down the railroad for nearly a month
http://www.rebelrails.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=2891
https://www.flickr.com/photos/95007796@N06/27087806988/
https://www.rich.mcclear.net/2015/09/22/home-of-the-phoebe-snow/
Is that some turd on a cell phone in the second to last picture?
ReplyDeletepassing time while waiting for the train? Yeah. Young people don't read the newspaper anymore, or do crosswords.
Deleteunder the Girlfriends name here, my dad worked for the DL&W, was on the milk run that got stuck in the Poconos.
ReplyDeleteI wish you could use a paragraph to explain the 4 segments of that sentence.
Deletewtf is "under the Girlfriends name here"
"was on the milk run" some specific one?
"that got stuck in the Poconos" during the floods of 55?
any time you can elaborate for the rest of us that can't read minds, will be a great time to use as many words as possible to wax eloquent on the hard to understand sentence you left me with