A revolutionary new rail-air combination service was inaugurated by the Pennsylvania Railroad in July 1929, and was promoted in this area as making 48-hour coast-to-coast travel across the United States possible. Associated with the railroad in this enterprise were Transcontinental Air Transport and the Sante Fe Railroad.
This "night by train and day by plane" innovation began its westbound schedule as the Airway Limited luxury train from New York, Philadelphia and Washington in the evening. The train traveled by night through Greensburg and Pittsburgh to Columbus, Ohio, at 8:15 a.m., when the plane took off from there to Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Wichita, arriving at Waynoka, Okla., at 6:24 p.m.
From there, the passengers traveled by Sante Fe rail to Clovis, N.M., and by air to Los Angeles, arriving at 5:52 p.m.
Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, who just two years earlier had made his historic transatlantic solo flight, piloted the first plane for this new service. His official title was consulting aeronautical engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
In its advertising, the railroad said that "extensive airports have been built, also emergency landing fields at regular intervals along the carefully prepared routes ... planes have been tested ... a private meteorological system worked out ... so that planes in flight constantly receive the latest weather forecasts."
However, this transportation adventure appears to have been short-lived.
The first county government with jurisdiction over southwestern Pennsylvania was that of Cumberland County, created by a Penn provincial act passed Jan. 27, 1750.
That county was the sixth formed in the state, and the first west of the Susquehanna River. Its formation was stimulated by the increasing settlement in the Cumberland Valley in south-central Pennsylvania.
Its borders were defined as "the lands lying within the Province of Pennsylvania to the westward of the Susquehanna," bounded on the west and south by the boundaries of the province.
The county seat site chosen was at LeTort's Spring, which on development had its name changed to Carlisle.
There was as yet no settlement other than a few scouts and traders in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the province did not have title to the land west of the mountains. When that was acquired in 1768 through the Fort Stanwix treaty with the Indians, development picked up.
By 1771, Bedford County was created because of the rapid increase of settlements on the frontier. Bedford County then included everything to the west, an area of about 9,000 square miles.
When Bedford was organized, a number of its officials were from what became Westmoreland, Washington and Allegheny counties. Robert Hanna, of Hanna's Town, which would later be Westmoreland's first county seat, was one of Bedford's three original county commissioners, and Dorsey Pentecost, of Washington County, another.
Weather has been a major newsmaker in the history of this week.
Sixty-one years ago, a wave of exceptionally high winds and tornadoes swept through southwestern Pennsylvania, killing 43 persons locally and more than 100 in nearby areas, including northern West Virginia.
The storm hit for about 15 minutes during the evening of June 23, 1944, and cut a swath through Greene and Washington counties (where 23 were killed). It then roared through southern Allegheny, Westmoreland and northern Fayette, to Indiana and Somerset.
Among hard-hit communities were Chartiers, Dry Tavern, and Castile in Greene; Independence in Washington; Greenock in Allegheny; and the Westmoreland-Fayette border area.
Pittsburgh radio station WCAE's transmitter tower in Baldwin Township was blown down. Roof sections of steel mills in the McKeesport area were swept away. Two priests at St. Vincent Archabbey, near Latrobe, were struck and injured by lightning.
Excerpted from Robert B. Van Atta's "Vignettes" columns of June 18, 1983 and 1994.
