We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot


Welcome to Ten Roads! This blog is intended to be a place for me to share my (generally Civil War-related) thoughts and experiences. I try to update once a week at the very least. All comments and readers are greatly appreciated!

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Train station open house

The station held an open house last Saturday (yes, I know, I am becoming such a procrastinator) and we actually had quite a turn out, especially considering it was a last minute type thing and it wasn't advertised all that much. Although I think the count got messed up a little bit along the way, it's possible that we had over 100 visitors, mostly local. Several other volunteers came in to help out (among them Horace Greeley and Father Christmas) and we all had a good time giving tours.
I learned quite a bit just from listening (or uh, eavesdropping) including that the future of the train station is not in much danger and that the park service will likely be the buyer. It will be quite a while before anything is settled.
I also learned of this very interesting site, created by train station volunteer Chuck Kann. Though not yet complete, but its use of Google Maps is extremely helpful in locating where on the battlefield one may find monuments and even witness trees. I especially admire that Chuck has done the coding and taken the pictures himself, oftentimes having to wait for certain weather conditions or for the precise time of day to get the right lighting. Even at this stage, I feel that Chuck's project rivals Virtual Gettysburg.
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Saturday's open house was one of the visitors to whom I gave a tour. He was an older gentleman, quite knowledgeable about trains (a topic about which I somehow still do not know very much). I was mentioning that the last passenger service was on December 31, 1942 but that they had some sort of reenactment of Lincoln's arrival when the gentleman interrupted me with, "I was there!" Turns out, he was present at the 200th anniversary of the Western Maryland. We volunteers were extremely excited to have met someone who had actually been there in 1952 when the Thatcher Perkins arrived at our station.

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