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Upcoming Programs

CERA's 2nd Friday, April 11, 2025 Zoom Presentation: Harvey Laner, West Penn Railways
Friday, April 11, 2025 7:00 PM•Virtual zoom: Tiny URL: https://tinyurl.com/CERAthe2ndFriday Meeting ID 814 9251 7167 Passcode 880028
CERA's FAN TRIP to ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA
Thursday, June 26, 2025•St. Paul, MN

Zoom Presentation

https://tinyurl.com/CERAthe2ndFriday

Meeting Number 814 9251 7167 Passcode 880028

Run Time: 1h05m

At its peak, West Penn Railways had 237 miles of electric railway trackage. It operated in the well populated coal mining and coking region of rugged, mountainous western Pennsylvania. West Penn Railways was a vibrant transportation system playing a key role in the pre-automobile, unpaved, poor road era, and was an important factor in the Coking region's economy.

This program combines Harvey Laner’s West Penn Railways video files of railfans Ed Miller and Gene Schmidt’s movies with Harvey’s conversational narration with West Penn Railways historian Ed Lybarger. Ed meticulously describes the route as Ed Millers’ movies take us from Uniontown to Greensburg. Ed Lybarger details West Penn’s LCL freight service, an in-depth description of the Companies passenger and work car equipment, a whimsical look at West Penn’s creative advertising program and an overview of the management people that guided the Company through thegood and the difficult years.

This complete story of West Penn Railways includes a look at the web of public utilities that connect it to West Virginia’s Monongahela & West Penn and Wheeling Traction Company properties as well as the Hagerstown & Frederick Railway in Maryland. Historic movie scenes of those traction properties are also included in this far reaching, comprehensive program.

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Since 1938, Central Electric Railfans’ Association has presented programs, published books, and hosted fan trips.

In 2024 CERA continued its successful online programs on Zoom, offering both “open-to-all” Zoom programs and programs marketed exclusively to members and prospective members. We also returned to our in-person programming at a new location and hosted a fan trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

We very proudly edited, published and produced the critically received Transit in the Triangle, Volume 2 which was mailed to all of our 2019 Members. Our goal now is to get out two books in the next 16 months to 2020 and 2021 members!!

We plan on making 2025 even better. Look forward to new things on Zoom and in our in-person programming, news on upcoming CERA-penned books and other featured products in our store and special deals on older titles in our inventory.

Please consider contributing to these efforts by renewing your membership, or becoming a new member. You can pay for your membership by check or credit card and online via our web site:www.cera-chicago.org/join. We accept PayPal.

CERA 2025 members will receive a hardbound book on an electric railway subject as a membership benefit. You can count on our publications to continue a long tradition of excellence in historical and contemporary electric railway research, while also being both informative and entertaining.