For several years in late January or early February, I would get together with Ed Ribinskas and Marty Surdyk for a day of railfanning in Lake County. Sometimes Jeff Troutman would join us.
We would spend much of the day on the CSX Erie West Subdivision and the Lake Erie District of Norfolk Southern in and near Perry.
This being Northeast Ohio, we always expected winter weather. By that I mean snow. But not every year saw bountiful snow on the ground despite Lake County being in a region of Ohio known for heavy snow.
During a few of those outings, the day was dark and dreary with little evidence of the beauty of winter.
That was not the case, though, during our outing of Feb. 2, 2014.
Overnight it had rained and then snow fell as the temperatures dropped.
The wet conditions meant that snow clung to just about everything in sight and pretty much stayed that way all day.
The result was one of the best winter railfanning outings I’ve ever had.
Several image from that day I’ve posted on this site before and Marty has shown during Akron Railroad Club programs some of the slides he made that day.
Ed won a monthly “best photograph” contest at Dodd Camera and received a free framed enlargement of that image that he has hanging on a wall of the dining room of his house.
That winning image was made late in the afternoon of westbound NS manifest freight 145 crossing the trestle over the Grand River in Painesville.
Last week I was rummaging through some of my digital file folders from early 2014 when I came across the images I made on Feb. 2.
Much to my surprise, I’ve only posted a few of those images on my Flickr page.
So I spent a couple days selecting and processing in Photoshop some images that had never been processed.
Shown above is a three-image sequence of the 145 crossing the now replaced Grand River trestle.
We were standing just beyond the west end of the bridge with all of us taking slightly different angles. What I liked about this series is how each image offers a different perspective.
The sequence begins with the train approaching the trestle from the east end, which captures that sense of anticipation that something memorable is about to happen.
It continues with an image of the train about halfway across the trestle and offers that compressed view common with images made with a telephoto lens.
The final image is what many would consider the money shot. Ed won the photo contest with an image similar to this one.
The train has reached the west edge of the bridge but is not yet off of it. The image combines the elements of a close train with a wide scenic view in a sort of convergence.
When I originally processed that image nearly eight years ago I converted it to black and white. There wasn’t much color in the scene and the conditions just seemed to say “black and white world.”
But after working with the image in color I decided it looks good in that form, too.
This day was one of the very few times I ever photographed NS operations on the Painesville trestle at the west end. I have numerous images from the east end, but rarely sought to do the west end.
The trestle had been built decades earlier by the Nickel Plate Road and was one of those structures that was always there even though ownership of the railroad changed to Norfolk & Western and then to Norfolk Southern.
It was always there even after the steam locomotives were retired, after the passenger trains were discontinued and after one generation of diesel locomotives had made way for another.
Generations of railroaders hired out and later retired after having crossed this bridge countless times during their long careers.
And then, so it seemed, one day the trestle was gone, replaced by a bridge that seems nondescript by comparison.
When viewed in this context, I’m even more pleased that we took the time in 2014 to get the photographs that we did of the 145 crossing the trestle.
Interestingly, that day was the only time I ever photographed an NS train crossing the trestle from ground level. But that is a story for another day.
Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders
Tags: Norfolk Southern, NS Lake Erie District, NS locomotives, NS motive power, Painesville Ohio, Painesville trestle, Railfanning in snow, railroad trestles, railroads in snow, trains in snow, trestles, winter photography, winter railfanning, winter railroading, winter weather
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