AC Tower in Marion originally stood on the north side of the Conrail tracks. It would later be moved to the south side and reduced in height by the group that also preserved Marion Union Station. Shown is an eastbound Conrail train on the Indianapolis Line on May 23, 1999. At the end of the month these tracks will be taken over by CSX. In the foreground is the Sandusky District of Norfolk Southern.
Photograph by Craig Sanders
RoadRailers were a common sight in Crestline in the latter years of Conrail. These trains originated in the east in either Rochester, New York; Elizabethport, New Jersey, or Rutherford Yard near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Rochester trains terminated in Crestline while other RoadRailers operated through to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Sandusky.
I didn’t record the train symbols of the RoadRailer trains shown above. The top image was made from the Ohio Route 61 bridge and shows a train on the Fort Wayne Line crossing the Indianapolis Line at Crest Tower. The view is looking northeastward.
The Crestline passenger station would have once stood in the northeast quadrant of this crossing. The image was made on Sept. 12, 1998.
The bottom image was made at ground level, and shows GP40-2 No. 3277 pulling a westbound RoadRailer on the Fort Wayne Line. The unit was built in December 1973 for the Reading and would later serve CSX. The image was made on Aug. 15. 1998.
Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders
I was scanning some color negatives of Conrail trains that I photographed in Berea in the late 1990s when I ran across this May 1997 image of a Conrail RoadRailer going from the Chicago Line to the Indianapolis Line at the west end of the Berea interlocking.
I had forgotten that Conrail once ran RoadRailers to and from the Indianapolis Line in Berea. I also found another image that is not shown above of a Conrail RoadRailer coming off the Indy Line.
The photo reminded me of some other forgotten things. For starters there is the original home signal for westbounds on Short Line to control movements through the interlocking where the connection from the Chicago Line comes into the Indianapolis Line.
This signal was taken down when Conrail added a second track here in the late 1990s in advance of CSX buying this property.
Notice how the signal has room for two sets of signal heads, a relic of when the former Big Four line here had two tracks.
The other forgotten item is just to the right of the base of the aforementioned signal.
It is the disconnected end of a siding that probably at one time went into the mainline track.
This might be the far west end of the Kunkle siding, but I’m not sure.
In days of yore the New York Central would interchange freight here with a short line railroad that served the sandstone quarries of Berea.
I was told that back in the steam era locomotives would be swapped out in Berea.
Whatever was the purpose of that siding, there was no need for it by the 1990s yet part of it had remained in place for whatever reason.
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