Richard's American Train Adventures

[richard carr]

SO after our visit to Caboose Stop Hobbies, we returned to Dubuque.

This is similar view to that from my hotel bedroom



This is the bridge over the Mississippi, that connects CN on the left bank with BNSF on the right bank.



You can just make out the BNSF loco in this one, it's about to cross the line going over the bridge which runs into a tunnel then swings round to the right to join the BNSF line further down stream.

The next day was our last one, we had decided to go to the Illinois Railway Museum, in part because the weather forecast wasn't very good and it wasn;t wrong. They do have lots of interesting exhibits on a large site, most of them though are hidden away in large barns, so they are hard to photograph but you can get up close and personal with them.

Here's a selection of what we found outside.



A UP gas turbine monster.



A Southern Pacific steam loco .







A Dash 8 40B originally for the Cotton Belt.





A C&NW SD40-2



An SD45



The museums future plans

And that was it, a quick stop at Des Plaines hobbies on the way to the airport and JB and Robin were on the plane back home.

 

[richard carr]

No sooner than I finish writing about the last trip, then the next one started and finished as I'm back home now.

One thing I have been meaning to do for a while is go down to Canal Street to video the evening rush hour trains leaving Union station and heading out west. So here's the video, it was all shot between 5:10 and 6pm, the lines come out of Union station cross Canal street and then turn 90 degrees passing under the track that go into the OTC (Ogilvy Transportation Centre). They then cross Clinton street. You can get up close and personal if you want to, there are no fences and only half barriers. It's pretty much non stop action and starts with a double headed FP40s.
I also managed to get a short video of the GP15s that are used by UP to switch the OTC.

So here's the video

Early the next morning I drove to Elkhart to meet up with Jim.

 

[Brian McKenzie]

Richard,

How often do tank cars get moved to the inner city siding alongside the Blommer Chocolate factory, corner nth Jefferson and west Kinzie streets?
This industrial siding, almost in the heart of Chicago fascinates me, as do other sites such as Votorantim Cimentos served nearby by barges. Also, not forgetting architectural oddities such as the former Boeing headquarters building, partly suspended from a frame on the roof to dodge rail tracks threaded below.

Reynauld's Euro Imports store out to the west in Elburn, with Lombard Hobbies midway, might help fill the suitcases.

-Brian McK.

​

 

[richard carr]

Hi Brian

I'm not sure how often it gets changed, but it does get changed as I sometimes walk up there on a lunchtime to see if it is still the same car, it usually has changed with each visit but that is typically every 6 to 8 weeks.

I don't need any help filling the suitcases, thats something I need to cut back on.

Richard

 

[richard carr]

I was in Chicago last week and I have just spent Friday and Saturday exploring Indiana and Ohio with Jim.
Saturday turned out to be an excellent day, we saw 22 trains in total, if you count seeing the Coke Express twice, once in Greenwich and once in Fostoria. More of Saturday later.

So Friday I arranged to meet Jim at Deshler Ohio in the afternoon, its a good 5 hour drive from O'Hare where I picked up the car if the traffic is good. I found the Kendallville Terminal Railroad on a map the day before so I had decided to stop there to break the journey. I wasn't really expecting to see anything, thinking it probably only runs once a week, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

The railroad leaves the Norfolk Southern mainline at Kendallville and heads south for 1 mile to terminate at a Kraft-Heinz factory. It is originally a Kraft factory that makes caramel candies.

Here's the sharp curve off the mainline accentuated by a telephoto lens





Half way along the line there are 3 sidings, you can just see the beginnings of them here




There were plenty of freight cars there, I suspect some were being stored.



Is that a small concrete plant ?





I then drove down to the factory at the end of the line



I'm not sure if this actually works, but this was working


A low nose GP9 was getting ready to switch the factory spurs, here it is in action.
I also shot quite a bit of video but that needs processing so it will later this week when gets posted up.

 

[Jordan]

Interesting to see the Kendallville RR. I'm sure it's been the subject of articles in the model press - one at least was in Model Trains International, edited by Chris Ellis, but as that was a low circulation, subscription only mag maybe it's been in another mag too.
A great inspiration for a modern, minimal Short Line that really is short!!

 

[Osgood]

Is that a small concrete plant ?

I would suggest it is a bulk storage / discharge facility for corrosive material e.g. salt or fertiliser going by the rust staining.

 

[Brian Daniels]

I like their office.

 

[Big Train James]

Salt it is. The Google street view shows a bulk transport truck for a local distributor of salts for water softening. I wouldn't be surprised if many folks in the area use well water, and therefor may need treatment materials. The other clues include the corrosion on the silos that Osgood mentions, and the aluminum or stainless steel bodied Cargill covered hoppers. Plus the hoppers are too large for cement.

Cement distribution would employ 2-bay hoppers, and usually the unloading of railcars would involve pneumatic conveyance. This silo group features a traditional bucket lift leg elevator rather than the tubing that is typical for pneumatic systems. Also missing are the filter baghouses atop the silos and a typical double-walled telescoping loading chute underneath. There's surprisingly little dust allowed to escape from the system.




In hindsight, the piles of salt lying around under the silo chutes make a lot of sense.

I've never seen a salt distributor before. It's another good candidate for a small-footprint rail served industry, very similar to cement distribution facilities. Perfect for O scale, aside from the lack of any component in the equation being readily available. No suitable structures, no suitable railcars, and no suitable trucks to haul product away.

 

[daifly]

I would suggest it is a bulk storage / discharge facility for corrosive material e.g. salt or fertiliser going by the rust staining.

I reckon you’re right about salt.

Dave
(Crossed with BTJ!)

 

[Big Train James]

Step Saver, Inc

 

[JasonD]

Interesting to see the Kendallville RR. I'm sure it's been the subject of articles in the model press - one at least was in Model Trains International, edited by Chris Ellis, but as that was a low circulation, subscription only mag maybe it's been in another mag too.
A great inspiration for a modern, minimal Short Line that really is short!!

.... and Richard's got a nice view of the turnout frog you scratch-built for us with no guard rails needed at switching speeds

 

[richard carr]

Here's the video, although it is about 12 minutes long this took nearly an hour to shoot, far longer than I had planned to be there. It had also started to rain and it was getting difficult to keep the lens dry. So I didn't stay for it all. Jim was wondering where I had got to.

 

[JasonD]

... hairs on the back of the neck time AGAIN. Apparently it's a 1959 built(!) Milwaukee Road GP9:

Former Michigan Southern Locomotives - RailroadfanWiki

railroadfan.com

And/or you can sit in the rental car up in the mountains waiting for the next 2-mile long/4 loco/manifest with DPUs. Aren't Nth American railfans lucky?

Jason (yeah, yeah ... Denny's for breakfast ... chicken mole for supper ... Father's Day all you can eat lunch with strawberry cider(!) at the old Framingham Sta commuter line into Boston and Conrail yard on the triangl... stop it Jason, STOP IT. Thank you Richard)

 

[richard carr]

Fried chicken wings in hot buffalo sauce, you can't beat them Jason.

 

[richard carr]

So after Kendallville, it was a 2 hour drive to Deshler to meet up with Jim.

The action was on as I arrived. A GP40 and a Dash 9 of some kind had brought in a short manifest train. I'm fairly sure that they collect this from NS in Leipsic, they bring the train up to Deshler (about 7 miles) run round it and then head south. To do the run round they have to bring the locos right up to the rail park on the south to west connector, to clear the signalling sections. I have seen this many times on the Deshler webcam.

Here they are heading back south with the Dash 9 at the back, there is a set of well cars parked on the left and you can just see the train on the right.



I then picked up Jim and we headed down to the south end of the sidings. Here's the GP 40 at the head of the train.



As you can see the weather wasn't great, thankfully it did stay dry.
After this we went back to the rail park. We had a few stack trains and then the afternoon south bound autoracks arrived just as a west to south manifest was arriving. This is all on the video to follow shortly, it's just uploading to Youtube.

Richard

 

[richard carr]

Here's the video for Deshler

 

[JasonD]

Just in case anyone needs to know what CSX pairs with a GP40-2 these days ... I paused Richard's good video to find out:

CSX ES44DC No. 5200

CSX ES44DC No. 5200 leads CSX empty trash train, Q702, eastbound on the Capital Subdivision in St. Denis, Maryland on 29 September 2007.

www.jeffsphotographyllc.com

An ES44DC
Jason

 

[richard carr]

I met up with Jim again on Saturday morning, the plan was to go to Greenwich (OH). At Greenwich the CSX east/west mainline is crossed by the CSX line from Berea down to Marion (east west through Marion) the Wheeling Railway also shares the track through Greenwich and typically runs 4 trains a day through there. In theory it should be fairly busy.
There are lots of different ways to get there, the fastest but most boring is to take I80 across towards Cleveland and then turn down to Greenwich.
However we thought it would be better to follow the railways by driving down to Fostoria and then across to Greenwich through Tiffin, Attica and Willard. There is large yard at Willard.

We got to Fostoria at about 8:15 and decided to pop into the Iron Triangle Rail park to see what was happening. Jim and I have visited a few times over the past 15 months, in theory it should be really busy, but it never has been when we have been there, until now.

As we pulled up a coal train was coming off the Toledo line and heading south to Columbus. There then followed almost non stop action until 10:30.

First up was a NS Autorack train heading west to Fort Wayne with a DPU in the middle, followed by a CSX manifest coming in from the east and heading north to Toledo, followed by another CSX manifest coming in from the west. We then had a NS stack train heading west, this was then immediately passed by a stack train heading east. Some great noise as the 3 locos start the west bound train moving. Next is a CSX autorack train coming in from the east heading up to Toledo, this then gets passed by a steel train heading west to Deshler then south down to Middletown for the steel to be rolled into coils.

 

[richard carr]

After all that action in Fostoria, we headed over to Greenwich, neither of us had been there before.

As we arrived the Coke Express was passing through, I managed to grab a quick shot of it.



The coke Express runs through Deshler every day on it's way to steel plant at Gary Indiana, I think it starts from somewhere near Pittsburgh, but I may be wrong on that.

We got chatting to some other railfans and we were told that 4 Wheeling and Lake Erie trains pass through Greenwich each day. Shortly after we got to see one.





A pair of SD40-2s, I think we saw 7007 on our June trip.

There had been a CSX manifest parked to the north since before we arrived, for several hours according to others with DPU problems. It departed next and the DPU can't have been the problem as there wasn't one.



We then had a bit of a wait, for well over an hour, then we had 3 trains at once.

First was this train of Autoracks coming from the Marion direction, it looked like he was heading north directly towards by it turned east at the junction.





Then a stack train arrived from the west heading north to Bellevue



Once that had gone past a trash train arrived, you cansee on the video that autoracks were still going round the curve to east when the trash train arrived.



The trash train had a pusher DPU.



After this we decided to cut and run, we were going back to Fostoria, but on the way we stop at Willard Yard.