The Spirit of Our First Responders, CSX 911, an ES44AC-H, pulled a coal train through Northeast Ohio on Monday.
The train N758, a coal train that originated at the Bailey Mine in Graysville, Pennsylvania, and was bound for a Duke Energy steam plant in Terrell, North Carolina. Some online reports had the train symbol as N759.
The trailing unit of the train was ES44Cc-H No. 765. The train passed through Akron on the New Castle Subdivision around 11:30 a.m.
It diverged at Greenwich and traveled via Crestline, Galion and Edison to Columbus.
Todd Dillion caught the train at Kent while Robert Farkas got it at Clinton.
The first four images are from Todd while the bottom image is from Bob.
CSX AC4400CW No. 562 leads an eastbound through Clinton on June 14, 2021. If you look down the street, you can see the consist of the train. This can help you to visualize how sharp this curve is.
The CSX office car special passes through Akron Thursday morning.Rattling the diamonds at Center Street in YoungstownAt Station Square in Pittsburgh. The Capitol Limited of the Baltimore & Ohio used to stop here.I got cloud skunked just as the train passed the Pittsburgh skyline
Thursday morning CSX ran its ofice car special across northern Ohio and Pennsylvania.
With two F40PHs and 11 passenger cars all decked out in a Baltimore & Ohio inspired livery it looked like the Capitol Limited had returned once again.
I first caught the special at Akron. The weather was foggy and overcast but my photos turned out okay.
Next was Youngstown where the weather wasn’t any better but I was interviewed by a local TV station curious as to why all the railfans were waiting on the Center Street bridge.
Then it was on to Station Square in Pittsburgh. The weather was much improved but we unfortunately were cloud skunked when the train arrived.
In times past the Capitol would have made a stop here.
CSX 8163 and CSX 3006 lead a westbound manifest train passing an eastbound in Easton on June 25, 1996, on the New Castle Subdivision. Although the 8163 is a common EMD SD40-2, 3006 is a rare GE BQ23-7.
Many if not most Northeast Ohio railroad photographers have in their collection somewhere an image of Nova Tower.
Located in its namesake town on the CSX New Castle Subdivision, Nova Tower continued to stand for many years after it was closed. It became a landmark for photographers for its decrepit condition, which included a noticeable lean.
How that tower managed to survive for so long is a mystery except to some supervisor at CSX who finally gave the approval to raze the structure in December 2013.
My hazy memory is that the railroad was amenable for a railroad museum saving if if the museum moved it off the site. That never happened although a tourist railroad operation in the West salvaged some components of Nova Tower to use in recreating an interlocking tower on its property.
Shown above are two views of the tower in its latter years. In the top image, an eastbound auto rack train passes by on June 21, 2010. At that time, Baltimore & Ohio color position light signals were still in use as were block signs. Both have since been removed.
The bottom image was made May 26, 2013, and also features an eastbound. The tower already was looking rough in 2010 and looked rougher three years later.
Note the railfan standing on the tower steps to get a photograph. Given the condition of the tower at that time, that is not something I would have done for fear the steps might collapse.
We’re stepping back a couple of decades to April 1996 to watch a westbound passing beneath the Ohio Route 21 bride in Clinton. The Baltimore & Ohio color position light signals are a dead giveaway that this is not a recent image.
I don’t know if Richard Antibus plans to show images similar to those above during his slide show to the Akron Railroad Club on Friday night. But he might.
Shown are three things that are not longer part of the Akron Railroad scene. All of them existed 20 years ago, but have fallen within the past decade or so.
In the top image is Erie Railroad herald that once adorned the freight house on Exchange Street in downtown Akron. The Erie became the Erie Lackawanna in 1960 and passed out of existence in 1976.
But the freight house, which was built in 1916, continued to stand and proudly show its heritage. One of the last uses of the freight house was to receive shipments of news print for the Akron Beacon Journal.
But things have changed and the freight house was razed in May 2013 to make way for a $20 million rental housing used by University of Akron students and known as The Depot.
In the middle is the former yard office for the Baltimore & Ohio. Located along Arlington Avenue, it served yards of both B&O lines in Akron.
The yard for the former Valley Railway is gone, but CSX still maintains a rather small portion of the former Hill Yard. But there is no yardmaster assigned there anymore and crews no longer report for duty here.
In this views, made on April 30, 2006, the rear of an eastbound CSX train is passing on the nearby New Castle Subdivision. This photograph was made the same day as the image of the Erie herald on the freight station. It’s a good thing I made these images when I did.
The former B&O yard office was destroyed by a suspicious fire Oct. 1, 2013. Akron firefighters said a door of the building, which by then had been vacant and board up for several years, had been forced open, leading them to specualte it might have been arson.
In the bottom photograph is the boarding platform for the Akron Amtrak station. Constructed in 1990, the platform is located where boarding platforms once existed for Akron Union Depot to serve passenger trains of the B&O and Pennsylvania railroads.
This image was made early on the morning of Sept. 9, 1995. Later that day Amtrak’s Chicago-New York Broadway Limited would begin its final trips. Amtrak Nos. 40 and 41 has begun serving Akron Nov. 11, 1990, after being rerouted away from the former PRR mainline between Chicago and Pittsburgh via Canton.
Amtrak service to Akron resumed Aug. 10, 1998, when the Chicago-New York Three Rivers began stopping here.
The Three Rivers was discontinued west of Pittsburgh on March 7, 2005. The boarding platforms were removed in early 2012 during a CSX project to revamp the New Castle Sub so that it could accomodate double-stacked container trains.
That work also led to the removal of the last umbrella shed and platform still standing at former Akron Union Depot site.
