EBT Herald East Broad Top Railroad Virtual Tour: Info

Creation

The EBT Virtual Shops Tour is based upon the EBT Virtual Tour. Like it, this tour started as a single page, listing the important machines and other items in the East Broad Top Shops comples. The list was largely based on the HAER documentation of the EBT Shops, but was not limited to that.

As with the EBT Virtual Tour, I entered all the information into a database and wrote scripting to generate the list with links to details pages, one for each item also generated by the script. That was the beginning of the tour. As time has passed, the script has seen many levels of enhancement to such as automatic links back and forth between the EBT Virtual Tour and the EBT Virtual Shops Tour.

As with the EBT Virtual Tour, my goal in creating the tour is twofold. First, to give a full impression of the shops or any particular item to someone who has not visited in person. Remember that the EBT Shops are only open to the public once or twice a year. Second, I hope the tour will become a repository for data, useful to both historians and modelers.

Navigation Tips

The tour will first show you the info about the section you are about to enter, then the area (if one is defined) and then show you each site in the area (or section) sequentially as you would see them as you travelled on the line away from Mount Union.

Each section and many areas will display an opening map which you can use to click directly to a point in the tour. Only the sites visible on the map can be reached in this way. All sites will be reached by using the forward navigation button at the bottom of each page or from the Tour Index.

Remember, whether you proceed down the mainline or divert down a branch you will eventually reach a dead end, just as the real EBT track does. You can always back out, go to the index to restart at a different part of the line, or click back to the top of the tour.

State of the Tour

The tour has reached it's inteded number of pages. More are added from time to time as new items of interest are discovered. The navigation of the tour will change in the future with the wing 'regions' linking to the individual buildings, with each building having a more detailed map than is currently on the 'regional' pages.

The main growth area of the tour is the addition of data and histories of the sites. Data to be added includes photos (both current and historic) of many items, complete photo references for all the published EBT books, plan, map and diagram references, and design details.

There are more typographic errors in the tour than I would like and those are being addressed as time allows.

Key

The Virtual Shops Tour uses the same abbreviations as the EBT Physical Roster which has a key available.

Errors

The data in the tour is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Where possible I have listed sources for the information presented, but I'm only human and humans make mistakes. If you see an error (technical or typographical) feel free to report it, but if it is a technical error, be prepared to cite references for your ascertion.

Report errors or comments here

Credits

Thanks to the Historic American Engineering Record for their invaluable maps of the EBT shops complex. The maps here are partially based upon HAER's work. Also thanks to Pat Downs for her invaluable (and endless) spelling and grammatical corrections.

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