For 23 years short line Ashtabula, Carson & Jefferson had a weekend tourist train operation. Trains would depart from the former New York Central depot in Jefferson and run north a few miles, stopping near the Norfolk Southern yard on the Youngstown Line south of Ashtabula.
The train was an eclectic mix of a caboose, a boxcar and passenger coaches painted in a livery reminiscent of the Erie Lackawanna. Later the coaches were painted a shade of boxcar red.
Car No. 1022, named Mill Creek, formerly worked for the Erie Railroad. Caboose 425 once worked for the Nickel Plate Road.
These photographs were made in Jefferson on Oct. 14, 2000, during my first visit to the AC&J, but it would not be my last. The Akron Railroad Club had an outing on the AC&J on Oct. 28, 2007, and I also rode in July 2009 when Viscose 0-4-0 tank engine No. 6 made a visit.
The AC&J ceased passenger operations in June 2014 and its passenger equipment wound up on other tourist railroads.
Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders
akronrrclub.wordpress.com 
December 13, 2022 at 7:23 am |
AC&J coach 1022 was in-fact an ex-Erie car, and also ex-Midwest Railway Historical Foundation (MRHF), and one of the original cars used behind ex-GTW 4070 on the Cuyahoga Valley Line when it started in 1975 for the first 10 or so years. MRHF had three Erie 1000s, modernized, air-conditioned, sealed window, six-axle heavyweights. They were sold off in the late 1980s for a group of former PRR P-70 coaches that ran on the CVL until MRHF parted ways with the operation in the early 1990s.