Steam Saturday: GTW 4070 on the CVL in October 1978

It’s October 1978 and former Grand Trunk Western No. 4070 is steaming southbound on the Baltimore & Ohio’s Valley Line between Cleveland and Akron. The image was made south of Everett Road in what is today the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

Steam Saturday: Chasing the CM&StP 261 Ferry Move in June 1996

Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 No. 261 steams out of Orchard Park, New York, on June 16, 1996. The tracks here have since been ripped out.

In 1995 Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul 4-8-4 No. 261 left its home in Minnesota and ventured east to help Steamtown National Historic Site celebrate its grand opening.

The Northern-type locomotive built by Alco in July 1944 had been restored to operating condition in 1993 by a group known as the Friends of the 261.

I was on hand when the 261 participated in the parade of steam locomotives held during the grand opening festivities on July 1.

Later that day, the 261 pulled an excursion train from Scranton to Pocono Summit filled with attendees of that year’s convention of the National Railway Historical Society.

The convention actually was held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we had ridden chartered buses north that morning to board a diesel-powered excursion to Steamtown.

The 261 remained behind in Steamtown for the next year, participating in excursions and other events.

But by June 1996 it was time for the steamer to head home to Minnesota.

I got a telephone call from my friend Bill Stephens, who at the time was living in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, asking if I’d be interested in riding the 261 ferry move from Orchard Park, another Buffalo suburb, to New Castle, Pennsylvania.

Bill was a correspondent for Trains and may have been covering the locomotive’s ferry move for the magazine.

He also invited some other friends to ride along. All we had to do was make a donation to the Friends of the 261 group.

Arranging this outing was complicated because the ferry move was one-way. This meant having to position our vehicles so that we had transportation to and from the train.

On the Friday before the ferry move, I met up with Bill in New Castle at the CSX yard office.

He parked his vehicle there and I then drove him to a motel in Buffalo where the four of us were staying.

The next morning we drove to the former Baltimore & Ohio station in Orchard Park to board the train.

There was a crowd of people on hand train because, well, steam locomotives attract crowds.

Some local officials were having an event to publicize their efforts to acquire the ex-B&O track through Orchard Park for use as a commuter rail service to be known as the Niagara Line. That concept, though, never panned out.

The train arrived and we swung aboard the tool car to get settled. We would spend much of our time in that car because the doors of the former baggage car were open during the trip and that was the place to be to make photographs and listen to the locomotive work.

We were on Buffalo & Pittsburgh tracks to West Eidenau, Pennsylvania, where the train got onto CSX.

It is hard to believe it today, but the 261 ferry move spent a lot of time on CSX going to and from Scranton, including traveling across Ohio and Indiana.

On the rear of the train was an open platform office car carrying a Missouri-Kansas-Texas drumhead.

My memory is that Trains had written about car 403 not long before the ferry move and featured it on the cover.

I spent part of the trip sitting or standing on the 403’s platform. In theory I wasn’t supposed to be in the 403 because I wasn’t a guest of the owner.

But he tolerated me being there, at least for awhile. After the train made a service stop, he approached me and when he began by saying, “well, friend . . .” I knew I had worn out my welcome.

We had brought with us some food items purchased from a Tops grocery store on Friday night. Yet somewhere in Pennsylvania someone ordered pizza to be delivered to the train. That turned out to be dinner for everyone.

There were not many passengers and I don’t remember talking with many of them although I might have.

Someone in our group said one of the passengers was Tom Nemeth, the editor of Railpace.

It was apparent throughout the day that railfan photographers were out in force following us.

It was sunny and the train didn’t move all that fast so I presume it was easy to chase.

In looking at my photographs, I found an image of some small town where our passage interrupted a parade on a downtown street.

We also made a stop at a town in New York at which there was a large crowd at a former B&O depot.

We knew the ferry move would make for a long day, but it turned out to be much longer than I had expected. Even someone who enjoys riding trains is ready to get off at some point.

Darkness came, the chasing photographers went home and I was sitting in a coach seat trying to catch some sleep.

We spent quite a bit of time in Butler, Pennsylvania, during the night. I believe we were waiting for a CSX pilot crew.

I remember seeing a train pass by overhead in the dark on a bridge as we sat in Butler.

One of Bill’s friends got down from the train, walked up to the locomotive and climbed up into the cab. He sat in the engineer’s seat for a while and, he said, began dozing off.

In retrospect I wished I had taken the time to visit the cab, too.

By the time we reached New Castle it was around 4 a.m. We had reserved motel rooms there and needless to say I was dead tired.

I shared a room with Bill’s friend Edmund who had traveled from Washington, D.C., to ride the ferry move.

Not only were we tired, we were covered in cinders and soot. Edmund stood in the bathtub and shook all of the cinders off. He then washed them down the drain.

It never felt so good to take a shower than it did after this trip.

The ferry move left Sunday morning to travel through Northeast Ohio on the CSX New Castle Subdivision.

But I was heading back to Buffalo to retrieve my car and return to Cleveland.

* * * * *

Over the years I’ve experienced a number of tie backs to that June 1996 day.

About eight years after it occurred I was sitting in Dave McKay’s living room on a Saturday night looking at slides of images that I might use in a book I was working on.

Dave had grabbed various boxes of images he thought I might find interesting.

Onto the screen popped photographs Dave had made of that 261 ferry move.

“I was on that train,” I said out loud. Dave had not known that.

He rattled off the names of other Northeast Ohio railfans who had been chasing the ferry move as well.

It was interesting to see that day’s trip from “the ground.”

Fast forward another 11 years and more photographs of the 261 ferry move surfaced when I was working on my second Akron Railroads book.

These images, though, had not been made in New York or Pennsylvania, but in Akron.

I number of people I had met through the Akron Railroad Club were standing near the tracks by the former Akron Union Depot when the 261 made a service stop.

In early July 2017 I traveled with Marty Surdyk and Ed Ribinskas to Arcade, New York, to photograph the Arcade & Attica steam train.

We stopped in Springville, New York, to photograph a passenger station and the right of way of an abandoned rail line turned into a trail.

This placed looked familiar. Marty said it had once been the B&O line out of Buffalo.

Then it clicked. This was the station at which we had stopped during the June 1996 261 ferry move.

I looked at my slides later and found an image I made of that station from the tool car. I had been there before.

About two weeks ago Ed emailed me some photographs of the 1996 ferry move. He thought he remembered my showing photographs of it during an ARRC program years ago and my having ridden it.

I didn’t remember doing that and a check of my past ARRC programs didn’t turn up any indication that I had.

Maybe Ed remembered a story I had written about that stop in Springview I had made on that trip to the Arcade & Attica.

Whatever the case, it prompted me to write this memory of my time riding the 261 ferry move. It is the last time I’ve ridden behind the 261.

I’ve seen it once since then, a fleeting glimpe through the windows of a Metra commuter train in Chicago.

And that visit to Steamtown in 1995 remains the only time I’ve been there, too.

Article by Craig Sanders, Photographs by Ed Ribinskas

At Beaver Siding, New York. The tracks gone here, too.

At Ellicottville, New York. The next image was made there also.

This and the next image were made at Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania.

At Akron Union Depot on June 16, 1996

Steaming out of Akron.

The chase ended in Willard.

Autumn in the Trench

It’s an early November day in Pittsburgh. An eastbound Norfolk Southern manifest freight is passing beneath a dramatic canopy of green and gold gingko tree leaves in West Park.

This section of the Fort Wayne Line is also known as the trench and is a favorite of railroad photographers, particularly when those gingko trees turn colors in the fall.

As nice as this image is, it could have been better. In another week or less all the remaining leaves will have turned gold and the falling leaves will leave a golden carpet on the four-track mainline.

But my window of opportunity to photograph here was limited to the weekend. Still, I was pleased with my results.

Amtrak Website Tweaked to Help With Booking Long-Distance Train Travel

Amtrak has tweaked its website to better help passengers plan travel on long-distance trains now that all of them except the Auto Train are operating tri-weekly or quad-weekly.

The “next travel day” feature will advise passengers seeking to make a reservation on the Amtrak website or via the Amtrak app that the train they wish to ride does not operate on the they have selected.

A popup screen will direct them to the next available day of operation.

However, passengers will still receive the message that “at least one portion of your trip is unavailable. Please try a different date and time.”

Updated timetables for long-distance trains that show days of operation also are available on the Amtrak website although finding them is a somewhat cumbersome task.

They will not come up when clicking on the “schedules” tab as was the case until last spring.

Instead, site users must click the “Destinations” tab. That brings up a U.S. map and clicking on the region of the country in you wish to travel will bring a list of rains operating in that region.

Clicking on a specific train brings up a box offering route “map” and “schedule” buttons.

Schedules that show long-distance and corridor trains are still unavailable.

Some corridor schedules are available on route specific websites although some of those still show timetables that are out of date.

R&N Begins Serving New Customer in Hazelton

Pennsylvania-based regional railroad Reading & Northern said it has delivered the first rail cars to its newest customer in the Humboldt Industrial Park in Hazelton, Pennsylvania.

The shipper is IRIS USA, a Japan-based plastics producer.

R&N said it helped IRIS locate at the site, its first in the Northeast, in March 2017. 

“An important element of the final site section was [our] ability to build the necessary railroad track infrastructure on time and on budget,” R&N officials said in a news release.

The release said R&N offers a dedicated customer service group and provides a scheduled delivery service within a two-hour service window.

Amtrak IG Calls for Expanded Drug Testing

The Amtrak Office of Inspector General called this week for an expansion of the carrier’s random drug testing program as a way to improve its ability to detect and deter opioid abuse by employees.

 The recommendation was made after the IG’s office studied 11,356 prescription and medical claims from 2019 and found 113 that met Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicators of potential opioid use.

The review also found 1,157 employees or about 10 percent of those in safety-related positions, has filled an opioid prescription while on active status thus making them at higher risk for impairment while the job.

The IG report recommends testing more employees and testing for more drugs.

Fewer Mines Seen as Needed to Boost Coal Industry

A common theme in recent investor calls discussing Class 1 railroad quarterly financial results and the weekly and monthly freight data provided by the Association of American Railroads has been the steady downward trajectory of coal traffic by rail.

Class 1 railroad executives and many industry observers have adopted a pessimistic attitude toward coal, saying that it will continue to lag due to low prices of natural gas used to generate electricity and the closing and planned closing of power plants using coal.

The coal industry itself is undergoing a transformation with some saying there are too many mines for the size of the market.

“There are too many mines and too few customers,” said Rob Godby, an economics professor who is deputy director of the University of Wyoming’s Center for Energy Regulation and Policy, in an interview with Trains magazine.

He said the best thing that could happen to improve the financial health of the coal industry would be a permanent closure of a mine in the Powder River Basin, where there has been little consolidation of operations.

That has resulted in less profitability for the owners of those mines. Some have sought bankruptcy in the past few years.

That included St. Louis-based Arch Resources, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2016 and is one of the major players in the Powder River Basin.

Arch said this week it is seeking a buyer for its mines and if can’t sell them it will wind down production in the Power River Basin.

The company said during a third quarter earnings call that it is transitioning away from thermal coal used to generate electricity and instead focusing on metallurgical coal used in steel making.

Coal was used to generate 48 percent of U.S. electricity as recently as 2008.

But the U.S. Energy Information Administration said that has fallen to 20 percent this year.

Last year Arch’s mines in the Powder River Basin produced 75 million tons of coal. It expects to produce 55 million tons this year.

A month ago Arch and one of its chief competitors, Peabody Energy, called off plans to combined operations in the Powder River Basin and elsewhere.

The Federal Trade Commission had opposed the due based on competitive concerns.

Drive Up Sites Named to Replace Clinchfield Santa Train

Drive-up gift stations have been chosen to replace the annual Santa Train on the former Clinchfield Railroad.

Toys will be distributed on Nov. 21 at Food City grocery stores in Pikeville, Kentucky, and in St. Paul, Clintwood, and Weber City, Virginia.

The gift stations replaced the long-standing Santa train. CSX earlier this year said it would suspend the Santa train this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conrail Blue in Massillon

Today’s Conrail Memory takes us back to Massillon on June 4, 1988. This eastbound manifest freight is led by SD50 No. 6757. The tain is on the Fort Wayne Line, once the Chicago-Pittsburgh mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

Cleanup of CSX Derailment Finished

Workers have finished cleaning up a CSX derailment in Dearborn, Michigan, that shut down traffic on Interstate 94 for a while on Wednesday.

The derailment occurred early Wednesday morning when four cars derailed on a bridge over the expressway.

One car was hanging over exit lanes and the road had to be closed to enable workers and equipment conducting the cleanup to reach the scene.

The Detroit area expressway was reopened after CSX officials determined they could complete the cleanup without the road being closed..

It took workers about eight hours to cleanup the site. No hazardous materials were involved in the derailment and there were no injuries.