FREEZE FRAME: The centerfold of the current edition of
Pennsylvania magazine is the Kinzua Bridge sprawled out in all its
fallen glory as part of its “Mid-Winter postcards” feature. We mean
that as a compliment.

Photographer Douglas Kunicki of Kane captured the bridge as it
was backlit by red skies, the ground and the fallen bridge supports
covered in snow. It’s a stark portrait of the broken structure
which, readers doubtless remember, was toppled by a tornado in
2003.

Perhaps, we were doubly enchanted by this shot since we’d come
to believe nothing would ever eclipse the iconic shots of the
bridge we are all familiar with — the old locomotive steaming
across the bridge as it spanned the valley below.

FEBRUARY ’45: Speaking of trains, you know it’s a really bad
winter when you see a freight train bogged down in snow drifts.

Clayt Vecellio — in a weird attempt to lift our spirits, maybe?
— dropped off a clipping from the Feb. 12, 1945, edition of Life
magazine, showing trains snowbound in the Buffalo, N.Y.,
railyards.

One shows a group of passengers huddled not far from the B&O
train which had stalled in a snow drift. “When the train’s heat
finally gave out, passengers were taken to homes of townspeople,”
the caption read.

A second shot showed empty coal cars which had been just dug out
of snow and switched onto a main track. “Recently Buffalo had 8,000
freight cars snowbound. Fair weather last week permitted some to be
moved before new blizzards again snarled traffic,” it said.

“The paralyzing effects of one of the most severe winters in
history were felt last week over all the northeast,” the story
noted. In all, 200,000 freight cars were snowbound in railroad
yards in what was reported to be “the worst freight congestion in
50 years.”

“Ice jams in New York Harbor were the thickest in ten years and
frozen switches hampered subway and elevated systems.

“Storms in the Atlantic were so severe coastal fishermen kept
their boats in port. Near Pittsburgh steel mills shut down because
they could not get coal and coal mines shut down because they could
not get empty railroad cars.”

Even war plants, it was reported, were shuttered.

Now that, we must admit, is real winter.