From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the Pennsylvania's engineers were ordered to four-track the original double-track through that narrow defile in God's great world, they shook their heads dubiously; then--after the fashion of engineers--they went ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the low-grade line.
Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its own course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main line, and for long sections following the trail of the long-since abandoned Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are to be left high in the air. The Pennsylvania's officers tell you that frankly.
"We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric motive-power already made," said one of them, just the other day, "and every year we wait, that tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less and less. It will cost money--money into millions of dollars--and it will earn 10 per cent on the investment."
From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the main line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line crosses the Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges once again and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles, completely avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to the south of it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight route crosses the broad Susquehanna at Shock's Mills, eight miles north of Columbia, and follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to Shenks Ferry, where it turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of Lancaster County to a connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From thence it follows the main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing and re-crossing it but at all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen Loch it makes a wide detour around Philadelphia and its suburbs and reaches with a long straight "short cut" over to the main line at Morrisville near Trenton.