I was in Philadelphia last week visiting my wife’s granddaughter. We flew so I did my exploring on foot, bus and rapid transit. While walking up 21st street past the back of the Rodin Museum, I noticed a depression that went down some 20 feet or more below street level and took up about a third of a block. This was between 21st, Hamilton, and 22nd, across the street from a police department district station. Cars including police vehicles were parked at the weedy bottom of the depression, and at the far end from my view on 21st was what appeared to be a stone tunnel portal, with rock and dirt rubble filling the tunnel. Looked like a railroad tunnel. It came out on a slight curve. It looked like it ran northwest more or less paralleling Ben Franklin Parkway going toward the big Philadelphia Museum of Art. I didn’t see signs of any tracks in the immediate vicinity of the museum, but it is on the east bank of the Schuylkill River. Seven blocks south, I had seen a non-electrified double track on the east bank alongside a hiking trail, just a block east of the Amtrak 30th Street Station (just to the left of the picture) and running under Market Street, John F. Kennedy Boulevard (the white concrete bridge) and the electrified suburban Regional Rail elevated (the dark gray bridge just behind and slightly above JFK). The apparent alinement from the tunnel depression seemed like it ran east from that point to parallel Spring Garden and Hamilton Streets. I saw there was a deep opening not much more than a foot wide but twenty feet deep between the building with the police station and an adjacent convenience store. (They call them “Wa Wa” in Philadelphia.) About three blocks down that direction, if it kept running that way, the track would reach the back of the Community College of Philadelphia, which before it had a college, had housed the UNITED STATES MINT. Link to Wikimedia photo of college/ mint. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Phila_USMint02.jpg Had I found a former secret underground track to the mint? Had it been used to transport express cars of gold bullion and silver to the basement of the mint? That would make a good story. But I found another good story too. When I got home to Texas, I hunted up a satellite view to check for satellite imagery evidence of a rail line in the vicinity. I found a Matthias Baldwin Park where the track should have run. From there, I googled and discovered that the park had just been renamed in April in memory of Matthias Baldwin, whose Baldwin Locomotive Works filled a sprawling area just to the east of my “mystery line” during the 19th and 20th centuries. Link to vintage engraving from Pacific Coast narrow gauge http://www.pacificng.com/ref/blw/img/blwlitho_t.jpg For a train fan, Baldwin Locomotive Works is as good as gold. (But did the tunnel connect to the basement of the mint? Anybody k now?)
