I hesitate to respond for fear of not being able to do justice to what you’ve written nor being able to sufficiently set down my own feelings after having read your history of Baldwin Locomotive works and the Delaware Valley and, by extension, the City of Philadelphia.

I am obsessing on the sermon and its simple meaning that in the absence of a person with his lived accomplishments (no matter how grand or humble) you shall know God. I spent 10 years of my life in the early 1970’s researching the liens and indentures of the various railroads of the Delaware and adjacent valleys and could not take my mind off the people who built and maintained this complex structure that allowed the rest of us to thrive and prosper. Who installed the interlocking on the East Pennsylvania RR at its connection with the B&O? Is the Reading track to Bound Brook, NJ capable of hauling fast freight? Who pounded the rail onto the ties? Whose eye pronounced the installation plumb and true? The absence of all these people today has left an unseen magnificent symphony of accomplishment and history that can only be attributed to the existence of “g