The Southern heritage locomotive passes BE Tower in Berea on Friday.At Chatfield on the Sandusky DistrictNorth of AtticaCrossing the CSX Mt. Victory Subdivision in Marion.The Reading heritage unit leads an NS stack train through the Cleveland area.
This past Friday I went to Berea in hopes of catching the Nickel Plate Road No. 190, a restored Alco PA1 locomotive on its trip to a new home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately that would not happen as it was still sitting in Indiana. However, I did have the Reading heritage leading a westbound train.
It had been recently repainted but has been out on the road for just over a month and is accumulating road grime.
About an hour behind it was the Southern No. 8099. It had just been rebuilt after being in a rollover derailment almost two years ago. It was its very first trip hauling train 746 a unit coal train for Bellows Creek, North Carolina. It looked very sharp.
I got both at Berea and ended up chasing the Southern as far as Marion. Maybe the NKP PA will come this weekend.
Trains magazine reported on its website that the PA spent a week in Clearing Yard on the Belt Railway of Chicago.
It was spotted on Norfolk Southern in South Bend, Indiana, on Friday trailing four NS and BNSF units.
The pilot getting off of 35N at Alliance35N at Wellsville35N at Salineville14N sits west of Alliance
On Wednesday morning the Pennsylvania Railroad heritage unit was leading train 14N and I thought that would be a perfect train to chase down the Cleveland Line single main and possibly catch a few other trains as well.
I arrived at Alliance at 11a.m. just in time to watch a double-stack train go east on the mainline.
This was not a good sign. Had NS reopened the mainline through the wreck area at East Palestine? It turned out they had not done so yet but would have a track open in a few hours.
The 14N was holding west of town and would spend the rest of the afternoon there before the crew outlawed.
I knew of a couple westbound trains that were coming so I went to Wellsville to try and catch them. I missed a 25P but I did find a 35N and chased that train back to Alliance.
It was almost dark when 35N left Alliance heading for Cleveland.
There were two more westbounds, a 171 and a 15N, but these both came after dark so no photos of them.
I don’t remember the last time I caught a Norfolk Southern train with a heritage unit leading. I do know it has been several months since that happened.
So I was pleased to learn on HeritageUnits.com that the Conrail heritage locomotive was leading Train 177, which runs from Chicago to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The 177 was the third train in an eastbound parade on the New Castle District on late Sunday morning. I had caught the parade leader, the 197, which originates in Fort Wayne and also runs to Chattanooga, at Cowan and then at Springport on the NS New Castle District in Indiana.
I also caught the middle train, the 189, which originates in Detroit and runs to Atlanta.
I heard the 177 calling signals on the radio and got into position. I would photograph it in New Castle, Indiana, where I also had bagged the 189 several minutes earlier.
The 177’s motive power consist was quite colorful. Aside from the Conrail H unit, it boasted a Union Pacific unit and a BNSF warbonnet.
Alas, things were not quite perfect when the 177 reached New Castle. The sky was clouds and sun meaning that catching anything between the clouds was a roll of the dice.
There was still direct sunlight on the nose of NS 8098 as it came toward my position, but then a cloud moved. You can see the result of that in the second image.
But I got the shot and that is what matters most. The image was made on Nov. 13.
The sun was still rising above the tree line when I arrived in Goshen, Indiana, last Sunday in search of fall foliage.
I knew from last year that the trees in Oakridge Cemetery along the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern could put on quite a display. I also knew that it might be several days before the foliage reached its peak color.
But the weather looked promising for Sunday morning so I made the trek to Goshen in search of color.
I had scarcely arrived and parked along River Avenue when NS intermodal train 22X showed up with a “special guest.”
The Norfolk Southern heritage locomotive was the second of the three units working the 22X eastbound. You can sort of see it even though it is enveloped in shadows. Likewise, trailing behind the NS H unit is a “Southern Belle” of Kansas City Southern.
It was a quite different motive power consist and got the day off to a good start.
On Wednesday NS train 14N had the Katy, and Savannah & Atlanta heritage units, and the Union Pacific Pink Ribbon unit. It came through Cleveland in late evening and we had storms in the afternoon as well. I went west to Vermillion in order to catch it in daylight which I did but the photos were okay but not great.
I chased it to Brook Park across from Cleveland Hopkins Airport and caught it a second time just before sunset. A Tim Misney “makes them pay” billboard was there and I framed it into the photo.
In the past decade, Ed Ribinskas has considered tracking Norfolk Southern heritage locomotives to be one of his many everyday chores.
If an H unit was leading a train that would pass through Painesville, he would grab his camera and head over to the Riverside Drive grade crossing if he could.
The Nickel Plate heritage locomotive made an appearance on March 30, 2013. Others that have passed by included the Southern H unit on April 26, 2014, the New York Central H unit on May 27, 2015, and the Erie H unit on April 10, 2016.
After construction of the new bridge over the Grand River got underway in March 2017, Ed sought to be a little creative in his photo composition by working the construction activities into his image as can seen above.
Some examples included catching the Erie heritage unit on July 15, 2017, the Savannah & Atlanta H unit on June 2, 2018 and the Central of New Jersey H unit on Nov. 25, 2018.
The Southern Railway heritage unit of Norfolk Southern sustained damage on Sunday after hitting a rock slide and derailing near Pittsburgh.
ES44AC No. 8099 and another unit were pulling a 100-car intermodal train bound for Chicago when it struck the rock slide and derailed about 4 a.m. in the borough of Baldwin.
No injuries to the crew were reported and no hazardous materials involved, The 8099 was leading the train. Both locomotives derailed along with five cars.
Officials said the derailment occurred along the Monongahela River in an area that had experienced high winds and up to a half-inch of rain.
Trains magazine reported on its website that the status of No. 8099 has yet to be determined.
For most of my years while I was working, I very rarely had the opportunity to railfan on or around the Thanksgiving holiday.
If I wasn’t working, then I had family related activities. I did find a couple days I was able to sneak away for a few moments.
One of those was Thanksgiving of 1983. I was able to use vacation time for a family trip to Libertyville, Illinois for a holiday outing with my sister Janet.
The day after Thanksgiving I went to the ex-Milwaukee Road tracks near Rondout, Illinois , hoping to see and photograph Amtrak No. 8, the Empire Builder.
This was long before cell phones and the Internet. I was hoping No. 8 would be close to advertised. I do remember a bit of prayer was evident.
The Empire Builder did show up pretty close to schedule.
Two days after Thanksgiving 2017, I photographed the Central of New Jersey heritage unit, No. 1071, coming out the siding at Unionville, Ohio, on Norfolk Southern train 316.
I should have left for home more than a half hour earlier. The sun had sunk below the tops of the trees and shadows enveloped the tracks of the New Castle District of Norfolk Southern in its namesake city in Indiana.
But I wanted to get “one more” even though I knew the images I might make would be marginal from a lighting standpoint.
That “one more” was not an ordinary train. It was NS train 282, a container train operating from Simpson Yard in Jacksonville, Florida, to Landers Yard in Chicago, with ES44AC No. 8102 on the point.
You might recognize that as the Pennsylvania Railroad heritage locomotive. An added bonus was that I would be catching the 8102 on rails that once had been the Pennsy’s primary passenger route between Chicago and Cincinnati.
It wasn’t like I haven’t photographed the 8102 before. I’ve caught it several times, including with such Pennsy artifacts as position light signals at CP Mace in Massilon and a bridge with a PRR keystone logo still painted on it in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
Getting the PRR heritage unit in and of itself, though, wasn’t what was keeping me trackside.
It had been a year and two days since I had last caught an NS train with any heritage unit leading.
For that matter it had been more than seven months since I landed an NS train with a heritage unit trailing. My luck has been that bad.
I had known for several hours about the 282 having the PRR heritage locomotive. There had been reports on HeritageUnits.com from Kentucky and in Cincinnati.
The last of those, at 12:40 p.m. reported the 282 was moving north in the Cincinnati terminal after having worked in the yard.
An unanswered question was how long it would take the 282 to get up from Cincinnati to New Castle. There had been no more reports on HU.com of en route sightings.
By late afternoon I knew the 282 was tantalizing close. The dispatcher had contacted the 282 crew to give it a 25 mph speed restriction. And I had heard a voice say the 282 was on the approach, whatever that meant.
Two trains, the 122 and the 174, were ahead of it and I photographed both in the nice late day light of late autumn that I was hoping would linger long enough for the passage of the 282.
As each minute ticked away the sun got a little lower and the shadows moved a little further over the rails. Sunset would be at 5:22 p.m. and it was now nearly 5 p.m.
It was shortly after 5 p.m. when I finally heard what I had been waiting to hear. The detector went off at milepost 95.3. The 282 was about five miles away.
Several minutes later came the sound of a locomotive horn blowing for grade crossings I couldn’t see. Then around a curve came a headlight.
Looking looked through my telephotos lens I determined that – yes – the nose was Tuscan red with gold pinstripes.
Two of the several images I made were decent enough to show, especially after I processed them in Adobe Photoshop. Still they are grainy and feature a dark locomotive in shadows.
I hope my next heritage unit on the lead sighting won’t take a year to get and that it will be in better lighting. But who knows.
There is a lot of luck involved in finding heritage and tribute locomotives. It is the proverbial being in the right place at the right time. Some places tend to be more right than others.
All I can do is get out there and hope the sun, the stars and the moon are all in alignment.
In fact, last Friday, when I made the images of the NS 8102 was a full moon day. You don’t think . . . nah, that can’t be it. Or is it?
My one and thus far only catch of the Central of Georgia heritage locomotive came in March 2015
Early Monday morning I opened my new email folder expecting to find a message from Edward Ribinskas containing a photograph of the Central of Georgia heritage locomotive of Norfolk Southern passing through Berea.
Ed had told me of his plans to attend a Frontier League baseball game in Avon Lake on Sunday afternoon with Marty Surdyk. They had planned to railfan in Berea before going to the game.
Catching the NS 8101 may have surprised Ed and Marty, but it didn’t surprise me.
On Saturday evening I had checked HeritageUnits.com to see if anything was setting up to come through Berea Sunday morning that they might catch.
I noticed an 11N with the NS 8101 was making its way across Pennsylvania en route to Sterling Heights, Michigan, from Doremus, New Jersey.
On Sunday morning I checked HU.com again to see how far west the 8101 had been reported.
The latest report was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, at 10:54 p.m. on Saturday. Had the 8101 been leading an intermodal train it more than likely would have been through Northeast Ohio hours before Marty and Ed arrived in Berea.
But the 11N works Conway Yard near Pittsburgh and manifest and bulk commodity trains don’t always move expeditiously, sometimes getting held for long periods of time for higher priority traffic and/or a new crew.
On Sunday afternoon I checked HU.com and found the 11N was reported at Berea at 11:05 a.m. or 11:07 a.m., depending on whose report you want to believe.
That would have been within the window of when I expected Ed and Marty to be in Berea; hence I was looking for Ed to send a photo of the 8101.
The two of them also caught DC to AC conversion unit 4000, one of the “Blue Brothers” locomotives that are so named because of a blue and gray livery.
You may recall reading in Ed’s report as well as a post Marty had written about his formula for having railfan success that getting the 8101 on Sunday morning completed Marty’s collection of photographs of all 20 NS heritage units.
Marty is correct in saying that success in catching out of the ordinary trains and locomotives hinges in part in doing your homework. Likewise, he is correct in saying that there is a lot of luck involved in being in the right place at the right time to catch something.
Neither Ed nor Marty indicated it they checked HU.com before heading for Berea on Sunday. If they had they might have found out as I did that there was a chance they might see the Central of Georgia H unit.
I say might because the latest report on HU.com before they actually saw the 8101 was the previous evening in Johnstown. If anyone saw it in Alliance and anywhere else east of Cleveland, they didn’t report it.
Likewise, the most recent report on NS 4000 was at Rochester, Pennsylvania, at 8:19 p.m. on Saturday.
Relying on HU.com or other online reports, e.g., Facebook, sometimes can only take you so far in determining what lies down the tracks that is headed your way.
That means Marty is also correct in saying that above all you need to be there if you want to catch something out of the ordinary or, sometimes, anything at all.
By coincidence the Central of Georgia H unit was the last one I needed to complete my check list of NS heritage units. When I finally photographed the 8101 on March 12, 2015, in Olmsted Falls, it was not the first time I had seen it.
I had seen it at least once but had not been in a position to get a photograph. One of those sightings occurred as I drove east on Chester Avenue in Cleveland and it passed in front of me on the Cleveland Line bridge over the street.
Although I’ve forgotten the details I have a hazy memory of having had a few near misses in getting NS 8101 in the weeks and months leading up to finally bagging it.
Alas, I haven’t seen or photographed the 8101 since then.
While researching this article I noticed that had Ed and Marty gone back to Berea or even to Olmsted Falls after the baseball game they could have caught the Monongahela H unit, which came west leading the 25Z.
It was reported at Berea at 7:23 p.m. but that probably was too late for them to still be trackside.
At some point you just have to call it a day, move on to other things, and hope that luck is still with you next time you are trackside.
We all need to remind ourselves from time to time that railfanning for most of us is a hobby and not a job with all of the pressures and demands that come with it. I have met railroad photographers who make rail photography into something akin to work.
They come back with some spectacular images that we all admire and enjoy. Maybe we even wish we could have gotten that image. You could have if you had been willing to do the work required to get it.
Yet is going to work the reason why you go trackside? For some the answer is yes.
As for Ed and Marty, I have a hunch that even if their Sunday in Berea had been just another routine day and the NS 8101 and NS 4000 had never come along they still would have enjoyed themselves and not been greatly disappointed about the two that got away.
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