Sesquicentennial of Renovo, Pennsylvania covers

Renovo, Pennsylvania is the definitive company town: in 1866, the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad Company built the town at the midway mark between Philadelphia and Erie, specifically to provide a freight classification yard and repair facility for the railroad's trains, five years after the railroad formed.

In 1907, the railroad merged into the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), and the latter continued to use and maintain the facility in Renovo (with a resurgence in its importance during WWII). Ultimately, consolidation of the PRR's facilities lead to the closure of the Renovo shops, and as Renovo celebrates its sesquicentennial, it does so as a town with a population less than a quarter what it was during the town's peak.

Of course, I knew none of this before I saw a "Renovo, Pennsylvania Sesquicentennial" postmark listed in The Postal Bulletin. But as I read about the history of the town, I wanted to be sure to do it all the justice I could. I found online a photograph from the Renovo yards, which I processed and used a cachet in the lower-right. The symbol of intertwined letters in the postmark turn out to be the insignia of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and I was able to find a photograph of a piece of vintage PRR equipment to extract and clean up an image of the company's official logo. I used that as a design element in the upper-right.

Because the "killer" portion of the pictorial was to the left, I positioned the stamps in the upper-left to leave the text legible: one Pennsylvania Bicentennial of the Ratification of the Constitution stamp (Scott #2337) and a 29¢ single from the Locomotives booklet of 1994 (Scott 2843-2847). These covers were the result of their careful handling of my requests.