Distance

Making the familiar trek from his Vineland home, following a route he has taken the last 12 summers, Asher Schwegel turns off Exit 14 of I-295 and heads west on Floodgate Road. As he navigates the final mile of his trip, across the railroad tracks, past the cornfields and whitewashed Cape Cods, a clearing on the right side of the road reveals his destination. On a 100-acre plot ringed by century-old trees sits Bridgeport Speedway, a clay racetrack five-eighths of a mile long. It's Saturday night, and there's no place Schwegel, 39, would rather be. Normally, he'd split his time between watching the races and serving as crew chief for his brother, Adam.

Walter Brower's eyes lit up as he recalled the rain-drenched day in 1939 when he and a buddy were the first to arrive at a train wreck in the thick of the Pine Barrens. "The cars were all over the tracks. . . . I expected to find people dead," Brower said as he recalled the Aug. 19 crash of the Blue Comet, a luxury train that had departed from Atlantic City with 47 passengers, headed for Jersey City, N.J. For residents of the isolated area, the accident stirred the most excitement and alarm since the crash there of the Mexican airman Emilio Carranza 11 years before.

SEPTA rail engineers, who have long resisted pressure to wear uniforms, are protesting a new requirement that they wear fluorescent green-yellow vests when operating trains. "We look like the Fruit of the Loom lemon in those things," said Thomas Dorricott, an engineer who is a labor union representative for SEPTA engineers. SEPTA ordered engineers to wear the vests as a "safety and security" measure when rail security was heightened after the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1. The vests are similar to those worn by construction workers, street sweepers, and SEPTA customer-service representatives.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - The last month was uncomfortable, the last day infuriating. After a dozen years as a coach in the Phillies organization, Greg Gross said he knew his job security was in question when he read an early September comment in The Inquirer from manager Charlie Manuel that insinuated it would not be a bad idea to make some changes in the coaching staff. "We knew then that people were gone," Gross said last week by telephone from Scottsdale, Ariz. "We didn't know who or how many, but you knew some guys were not going to be back.

GIRLS Teams: 1 Columbia, 64; 2 Penns Grove, 54; 3 Buena, 52; 4 Winslow, 46; 5 Millville, 46; 6 Kingsway, 42; 7 Delsea, 34; 8 Woodstown, 33; 9 Woodbury, 30; 10 Egg Harbor Township, 29. GROUP RESULTS Group 1 4x100: 1 Penns Grove (Richarrd Nichols, Jaye Pollard, Faleesha Dowe, Kianje Pollard), 49.32; 2 Haddon Heights, 51.88; 3 Woodbury, 52.48. 4x200: 1 Penns Grove (Jaye Pollard, Jocelyn Brown, Kianje Pollard, Faleesha Dowe), 1:43.39, 2 Audubon, 1:50.28; 3 Woodbury, 1:51.55.

Francena McCorory thought the finish line was moving back as she dueled on the home straightaway Saturday at Franklin Field trying to extend the winning streak for the United States in the women's 4x400-meter relay in the Penn Relays' "USA vs. the World" races. The Olympic gold medalist strained and stretched across the finish line by scant inches over Great Britain's Perri Shakes-Drayton to give USA Red the victory, the 12th in a row for the home country at Franklin Field. "I was looking for the finish line," McCorory said with a smile.

Stephen Moore was lounging in his second-floor bedroom one Saturday afternoon last month, channel-surfing with his shoes off, when, he says, he heard his home security alarm blare: "Front Door Open. " Downstairs, police officer Larry Shields entered the vestibule. In October, Shields had been cleared of criminal charges by the District Attorney's Office and the Police Department's Internal Affairs Division for shooting an East Frankford man in his home in front of his fiancee and children.

Here at Holy Land U.S.A., there are no rides - unless you count the wagon and minibus tours. Farm animals in this theme park often outnumber daily visitors. There are no lines for exhibits, no costumed cicerones. No food concessions, fast or otherwise. "Bring 5 loaves and 2 fishes and have lunch by the Sea of Galilee," suggests the park's brochure. Finally, the playland as parable. Situated in southern Virginia amid the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Lynchburg and Roanoke, this 245-acre replica of ancient Israel is a fantasy land tucked far away from mall-to-mall America.

Mary Lynn Vogel and Eugenia Iannone are two Bellmawr mothers who would like to have their children bused to school, but cannot. The Bellmawr Borough School District says that the distance between the two families' homes and the Bell Oaks middle school on Anderson Avenue, which their boys attend, is about 100 yards short of the 2-mile radius outside which children in the district can be bused. The women say the school district is wrong about the distance, and on Tuesday night they and their husbands asked the school board to remeasure the mileage between their homes in the 400 block of Roberts Avenue and the middle school.

When Ira Davis was a blazing world-class sprinter and triple jumper, he didn't look down on long distance runners. Davis, one of the greatest track athletes Philadelphia has produced, was impressed by their dedication. "I always admired them," Davis, a three-time Olympian from La Salle University and Overbrook High, said this week. "I said, 'I'd like to try that.' " Tomorrow, Davis will make his marathon debut as one of the more than 2,000 runners in the Philadelphia Marathon, which starts at the Art Museum at 8:30 a.m. "I promised myself I'd do it before I was 60," Davis said.