Richard's American Train Adventures

[richard carr]

Here's the final video from my Chicago trip in early July

It starts with some autoracks going over the hump in Galesburg, then the locos.
After this I head out a bit west to catch some trains leaving and going to the main yard.

Richard

 

[richard carr]

I'm in the US again this week, so yesterday I headed over to Ohio via Michigan to explore a few places on the way.

First up was Kalamazoo, it's about 160 miles from O'Hare airport, but it is freeway all the way there.
There is a mainline through the town that Amtrak uses to get to Detroit and Canadian National are the main freight operator. The local operator is the Grand Elk Railroad who run there daily train to Elkhart using old SD40s. Unfortunately I was there on a Friday and recent viewing of Elkhart suggests that the Grand Elk runs south to Elkhart on a Friday and then the locos stay there for the weekend or go back light engine.

The first stop was the Grand Elk



The yard is to the left and a couple of locos were there





4225 is a regular on the Elkhart train, it's a former SD45 converted to be a SD40-2



A wider view of the yard, but nothing was moving at all.

So I went off to explore the town

 

[richard carr]

The mainline runs right through the middle of downtown.



Nothing is heading west

This then gets crossed twice by the Grand Elk line to Grand Rapids and another branch line. You can see the 2 crossings here when have zoomed the camera in





All the tracks are shiny so they clearly get regular use, just not when I'm there.

Looking back into the town centre, thats a pretty tight curve



I headed out of town towards Battle Creek, and saw a GP9 that appears to be a switcher at a gravel plant or something similar




Of course it wasn't doing anything.


I got to Battle creek and finally saw a green signal




It wasn't too long before this arrived



A train load of autoracks and stack cars.

 

[AJC]

Interesting to see this side of Kalamazoo - I went there for a conference in 2009 (the largest medieval studies conference in North America is held at the University of Western Michigan. No, I couldn't easily say why), and while I heard a fair few trains, what with being there with other people , I didn't actually see any beyond the Amtrak in the distance. Seems that, if you somehow catch it on the right day, it's a diverting place from a railroading POV. Annoyingly - the campus is/was 'dry' so the beer was unspeakable and the wine, if anything, worse; I only found out about the Hop Cat brewery after I got back...

Should I ever go again, I'll have to be better prepared!

Adam

 

[richard carr]

After the train went past everything went back to red, so after about 15 minutes with no sign of anything else happening I decided to go the northern end of the yard, mainly because you can. There was the train and a crew change was taking place.



I was waiting for the train to depart and heard the engine getting louder, I turned round and found another train coming out of the left hand part of the yard. I was setting up the video camera at the time and manged to grab a few seconds of video, but I didn't manage any stills.

Once the manifest was out of the way, the train set off.



This I also got on video, it made a fantastic noise pulling away.

After this I decided to move on to the next place, Jackson Michigan, it's about 50 miles further east from Battle Creek.
There's an Amtrak station there so that was the first stop.



Lots of red again, but notice the ground signal guarding the exit from the yard, it's green, there's a train coming.
Half an hour later and still no train, so I set off for the yard, hoping the train won't go by as I'm driving. You can't see the yard from the station, it's round the corner.



There were road works every where, but I made it just in time.



The perfect modellers train, an SD40-2 and 6 freight cars, it was probably a local heading to Lansing.



And quite a bit of clag as it set off.




The yard was full of interesting stuff, and surprisingly there was a total lack F OFF railfans signs.
The driver waived at me as he went by ! Maybe they like railfans here.





so here in this view are 2 more SD40-2s and 2 GP38-2s and a GP40 from the Adrian Blissfield Railroad.










The next stop was to be Adrian.

 

[richard carr]

So the next stop was Adrian, the home to the Adrian and Blissfield railway.
By now time was getting on and I was still 90 minutes from Findlay where I was spending the weekend, so I didn't have time to explore much.

I did find the engine shed, with another GP40.



And just a long the road this GP9 was languishing, it looks in a very sorry state



The Wabash mainline from Detroit to St Louis runs through Adrian and there is a connection onto the ABRR. The ABRR then runs down to Blissfield about 12 miles south east and serves a number of grain elevators and an ethanol plant, it then goes on to connect to the Indiana and Ohio railroad. At Blissfield they run a dinner train, I saw it as I drove past. There is certainly plenty here to explore on another trip.

 

[Jordan or Plymouth Mad]

The perfect modellers train, an SD40-2 and 6 freight cars, it was probably a local heading to Lansing.

Indeed. People (usually in the UK) who think all American trains are mile-long freights with 5 locos on the point are rather mistaken.

home to the Adrian and Blissfield railway.

The same people would likely assume that's a silly & implausible made-up name chosen by a modeller.

 

[richard carr]

Saturday morning it was time to head to the Marion RPM meet in Marion about an hours drive away.

The show is in the former Union Station building between what are now the CSX north south lines and the norfolk southern lines. Then there is a CSX east west line that crosses both of the above, all are double track through the station area but eventually become single track a few miles from the town.

The first train up was a north bound stack train on the NS lines. This is on the video when I get around to doing it.

Then this arrived from the south on the CSX lines an empty coal train.



Then there was another stack train on the NS lines this time heading south.






Followed by this train of empties which stopped short of the crossing on the CSX lines.



Then a train from the east arrived



and shortly after the locos went by a stack train came in from the west. That's all on the video.

 

[richard carr]

The interesting thing about the east west manifest was that it included a 5 car well car set with 5 containers on board.
I managed to grab a shot of the back of it, you can see it all in the video.





There were lots of old box cars too.








Then a south bound manifest on the NS lines arrived, it's an ACe on the point.





In the background an SD40-2 was parked up on the NS intereconnecting track.



Next we had another north bound stack train on the NS lines



By this point I still hadn't been inside to view the models.

 

[richard carr]

I did eventually go inside and see the show. It's a pretty small show and everything was HO but some very nice models on display.

That also meant I missed a few trains but you can't catch everything.

So it got to about 1pm and we headed off to get some fried chicken for lunch from one of the local options Lees Chicken, definitely better than KFC.

We then headed to Carey, the CSX route from Marion north to Toledo via Fostoria. On the map it says the Wheeling and Lake Erie have a big yard there, so it was time to explore. It turns out there is a large quarry producing gravel, and we found a 4 loco lashup of SD40s switching a train of loaded gravel wagons.





This one 3073 is an SD40-3 (I looked it up) the others are SD40-2s. The track to the left leads to the CSX line, to the right goes into the yard, a decent sized one with5 or 6 tracks





As this was all happening a local arrived on the CSX line heading south to Marion. I just had time to get the video set up and film it.

The SD40s now pushed their train back into the yard and ran round it, so now they were half a mile away at least and well out of view.
Jim found a route down to the other end of the yard and we set off after them.

 

[richard carr]

So we drove down to the other end of the yard and found the locos there. They were removing one from the consist and added a replacement.
This seemed to take ages.

So 3073 is now on its own, this was the rear loco when we were at the other end of the yard.



7012 was now the lead loco





They ended up swapping 7012 for 7007 the blue one below.



This switcher was parked up on the other side of the tracks and we could wee wagons moving around on the very far side of the quarry.



SO with everything now in the right place they put two rakes for freight cars together and headed off.

 

[richard carr]

Here's the video from Marion

 

[Yorkshire Dave]

Nice video - I don't know what camera you're using but the mic is picking up the deep prime mover rumbling sounds really well of the some of the locomotives as they pass slowly and/or start moving.

 

[Yorkshire Dave]

7012 was now the lead loco

Shades of Rio Grande - the icing on the cake would have been one of W&LE's three ex-DRGW SD40T-2 locomotives.

 

[richard carr]

Dave

I use a Rode Video Mic Pro+, it's worth every penny in my view, it really does the job of picking up the deep rumble of an SD40-2 or an SD70 ACe.
It's surprising how similar they sound.

Yes it would of been nice to get 3 ex DRGW SD40s but as far as I can see they don't have any ex DRGW SD40s, there's quite a few SP ones whoch was of course owned by the DRGW in later years, but none that were originally DRGW.

Richard

 

[Big Train James]

I've seen ex-DRGW units in the Toledo WLE yard. It looks like current units 5412 and 5413 are ex-DRGW while 5411 is ex-SP. I have no idea if they're all still on the roster. Just checked one of the photo sites, it looks like both ex-DRGW units are still in original paint with the flying Grande logo, with just the roadnumber updated. The last photo for one is May of 2025 and the other is this month.

RRpicturearchives.net Wheeling ex-DRGW sd40t-2's

 

[richard carr]

Here's the video for the SD40s switching in Carey OH

 

[richard carr]

Here's the next video from the trip back in October, it has the Southern Pacific loco, it's the 4th train in the film.
I'm now back in Chicago ready for the next journey east on Friday, it's cold but it does look like the sun is going to shine, which definitely helps on a chilly day.

Richard.

 

[richard carr]

Here's the final video from the last trip, it was the first one I filmed on the Friday afternoon at Battle Creek Michigan.

The Ace makes a great sound when it pulls away from the yard.

 

[richard carr]

Last week was another business trip to Chicago, so Friday morning at 6am I picked up a car at the airport and ended up driving to Elkhart. There was nothing going on there, so I headed down to Goshen. I parked up in Martin's supermarket car park, but again nothing happening all signals on red. The next stop was the other end of Goshen for Brunk Plastics where the local could be switching. It was there but had just moved back onto the main



So I hurried back to martins supermarket and waited.

Men working on the track so nothing is going to move with them still there.



Then I heard a horn and this arrived



It's the 2 bay hoppers full of sand, the second loco is a Canadian Pacific one.

It just sat there clearly waiting for hte track work to finish. A green signal appeared for the 2 bay hoppers but before it set off this stack train arrived.



Finally the 2 bay hoppers set off, they made a great sound.



But still no sign of the local, it is possible it beat me back but that seemed unlikely with the track work going on.

Then this arrived from the east heading an ethanol train.




Still no local, but by now it was gone 1pm and I needed to get going, the first stop was going to be Leipsic