Reading & Northern in the Lehigh Gorge, July 2016

For a number of years, the Reading & Northern has operated a round trip from Mountaintop, above Wilkes-Barre, to Jim Thorpe as a fundraiser for the local United Way.  In 2016, it ran on a hot July Saturday, and a friend and I chased the trip.  Due to the inaccessibility of much of the route, along the Lehigh River, we actually did very little chasing, walking deep into the Gorge in the morning to the south portal of Rockport Tunnel for our only photo of the southbound train; in the middle of the day, we rode the cab of a regularly-scheduled Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway train from Jim Thorpe to Old Penn Haven (a GP30 diesel, not the steam locomotive), and for the steam train's northbound run we made photos at the cut at Glen Onoko (just north of Jim Thorpe) and at the White Haven Tunnel.  At the end of the day, we watched the crew servicing the engine at Penobscot Yard in Mountaintop, and I tried a few long-exposure available-light photos of the engine, and of the signal bridge under the spectacularly clear startlit sky.