East Broad Top Railroad Virtual Tour: Info

Creation

The EBT Virtual tour started as a single page, listing the important sites and strucutres along the East Broad Top and a few stats on each. The goal of the list was to list all sites present during the twilight years (1940's and 50's) of the road. The list started with towns and grew into a list of over a hundred items. From the beginning I had wanted to add more info, but the list format could not hold it and maintianing a hundred more pages exceded my available time.

As a solution I entered all the information into a database and wrote scripting to generate the list with links to details pages, one for each site 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 create navicable paths from site to site that mimic the tracks of the EBT itself.

My goal in creating the tour is twofold. First, to give a full impression of the line or any part of the line to someone who has not visited in person. I feel the tour can do so better than a simple narrative or geographically arranged photos. Second, I hope the tour will become a repository for data on the line, 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 sites of interest are discovered, but the tour will never include culverts, rail racks and the like. The navigation also works as intended, though some manually added links will need revision.

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 sites, 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 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 Jim Strong for providing the digital 3D releif maps of the East Broad Top. Also thanks to Pat Downs for her invaluable (and endless) spelling and grammatical corrections.

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