CN Provides Land for Conneaut Reclamation Plant

Canadian National is providing land for a project in Conneaut to dredge the city’s harbor on Lake Erie.

The project was kicked off on Oct. 26 with a groundbreaking ceremony for construction of the city’s dredged material reclamation facility.

City officials said the facility will help keep the waters of Conneaut Harbor clean and accessible for ships.

A report in the Ashtabula Star Beacon said the project came about because of a state law banning open lake dumping of dredged material. Instead, the dredged material will be processed at a treatment plant.

“By taking that out of the lake and bringing it into an upland treatment facility like we’re constructing here, if all seven of the Great Lakes ports in Ohio do that, we can reduce algal blooms on Lake Erie by as much as 50 percent, which is huge,” said Jim Hockaday, Conneaut city manager.

The facility will be located on land owned by CN and leased to the city for $1 a year for 40 years.

Independence Excavating has been awarded a $11.47 million contract to build the facility, which is expected to open in a year once work begins.

“We have obviously a huge footprint here; we have interest in the maritime trade and making sure that the vessels could come in loaded, so for it to work, we needed to come to the table and give part of our property for a dollar, so that’s how we made it work,” said CN Vice President of Strategy Jamie Lockwood.

The plant will be known as the Conneaut Creek Dredge Reclamation Facility

Playing a Hunch Paid Off

Last Sunday Marty Surdyk and I were headed home after a day with the Oil Creek & Tutusville tourist railroad in Pennsylvania.

But we made a stop in Conneaut where we parked across the CSX tracks from the Conneaut Railroad Museum. It was just after 5 p.m. as we saw volunteers from the museum departing after closing for the day.

We were hoping to catch CSX No. 3194, the Spirit of Our Law Enforcement unit, which was on the point of the Q010.

What we didn’t know is that it had passed through Conneaut about an hour earlier.

Around 6 p.m. we heard horns coming from the southeast. It definitely was not CSX, but possibly Norfolk Southern or the former Bessemer & Lake Erie (now Canadian National). They sounded for two or three crossings then everything was silent.

About 15 minutes later on a hunch we drove to the Main Street crossing of the Bessemer and sure enough there was the rear of a CN empty ore train dropping into the harbor yard.

After it disappeared past the former Nickel Plate Trestle, we went back to staking out CSX by the museum.

Eventually we went back down to Main Street in case a CN train would come out before we had to head for home.

On a hunch we went down to the overlook on the west end of the Bessemer facilities. In a stroke of good luck we saw the train that arrived earlier was on a loop track loading iron ore. Here are a few photographs that I made of it.

Article and Photographs by Edward Ribinskas