What?
PinCrossing (http://pincrossing.com) is the pinball arcade inside the Railroad Street Bar and Grill, in Linfield PA. The Railroad has been around for years and is known for having one of the best beer selections in the area with over 40 beers on tap (http://www.beermenus.com/places/3164-railroad-street-bar-grill), as many bottles, and a great menu. Our machine lineup is expected to be between 10 and 12 machines when we open and will hopefully expand by 4-5 more once a back office is converted to usable space. The current list of games is maintained on the website and includes some of the most popular early solid states, a nice sampling of “A” list WPCs, and Lord of the Rings as our pick to cover the modern era.
Why?
We love pinball. We also love good food and we really love good beer. Unfortunately, there wasn’t too many options for combining this all together in our area. If we wanted to play pinball by ourselves, many of us could stay home and do that in our basements. The whole point of the PinCrossing is to have a place where we can meet up with other pinball people, grab a drink and a good meal and play some of our favorite machines from various eras.
How?
As a group of pinball enthusiasts, we have these simple driving principles at PinCrossing:
1) We know it is extremely difficult for “operators” to make any money routing pinball machines these days, which is why the majority of them no longer do it. Many of the ones that do, let maintenance fall by the wayside due to the overhead costs associated with it, which leaves us players with machines that don’t work! To address this we decided to change the rules of the game. We simply have no expectation of actually making any money. Brilliant, right? This has been clearly laid out to all the parties involved. The owner of our venue is a big pinball fan which helps. He also realizes that pinball players like to eat good food and drink good beer while they play and that is where he hopes to cover his costs for handing over valuable floor space.
2) We believe it is critical to keep our machines in as close to 100% working condition as we can possibly keep them. To help ensure that happens, we are adopting an approach to maintenance that will be shared by the members of our players association. This means at any given time there will be 5-6 people that can fix a problem with a machine. The downside is that the machine owners need to get comfortable with other people pulling their glass to deal with issues. The upside, to everyone else, is that there is a much higher chance of a given game getting fixed quickly.
3) We believe leveraging the pinball community is critical to our success. Our “PinCrossing Players Association” currently includes 6 machine owners, several area techs and some people that are just interested in learning more about how to take care of pinball machines. If you live in the Linfield area and are interested in becoming involved, please send me a PM.
Frackville, PA
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