Over the years Brady Lake has been a favorite hang out of mine to watch Norfolk Southern trains on the Cleveland Line. On occasion I’ve also caught an Akron Barberton Cluster Railway train here, too.
Towner’s Woods Park is located next to the tracks and has plenty of parking. The park also features a former Pennsylvania Railroad interlocking tower, which the PRR named Brady’s Lake.
At one time, the tower controlled switches and signals for the Lake Erie & Pittsburgh line to Cleveland that diverged here.
The LE&P is nearly all gone today and there are few signs by the tower that it ever existed. Portions of it are a hike and bike trail.
The top image was made on Nov. 4, 2005, and shows NS westbound manifest freight 15K passing the tower, which is shrouded by colorful fall foliage.
The bottom image was made on Feb. 1, 2000. The tower is easier to see with the leaves off the trees but remains somewhat obscured by tree branches and trunks.
It’s late on a Saturday afternoon in November. Farmers are using every moment of their waking hours to harvest their crops and get them ready to take to market.
Maybe the corn is not quite as dry as it needs to be, so its put into a bin with a dryer attached.
Growing up in east central Illinois I well remember the sound of those dryers humming in late afternoon on late days.
As I stood near a rural Indiana grade crossing to make this mage of Norfolk Southern steel slab train 61T rumbling past the farm fields near Greens Fork, I could hear one of those dryers in the distance.
That along with the wind blowing and steel wheels rolling on steel rails was the soundtrack for the afternoon.
Union Pacific No. 6247 is the last locomotive in a light power move to Bellevue. The signal at right is for a Wheeling & Lake Erie train.
A trio of Union Pacific units trail as a train gets underway headed for the Fostoria District.
Trailing in the motive power consist of train 175 as it passes the old reservoir at Caroline.
Helping to pull train 60U south of Attica.
During the longest day outing of the Akron Railroad Club last Sunday in Bellevue, Union Pacific motive power showed up on at least four trains, albeit trailing in all instances.
A UP unit was the last unit on a light power move, which meant that it was facing outward as it rolled through the mini-plant. So the photograph gives it the appearance of leading even if it isn’t.
Still, it is nice to see something colorful and foreign when going trackside.
Marty Surdyk, Todd Vander Sluis and I were out chasing Norfolk Southern trains on the Sandusky District south of Bellevue on Sunday during the Akron Railroad Club’s annual longest day outing.
CSX was single tracking in the vicinity of Attica Junction and had trains backing up. Norfolk Southern ended up paying the price.
The 29G, though, got lucky. The CSX dispatcher agreed to let it across between CSX traffic without much delay, but NS train 175 on the other side of the crossing would have to wait at West Attica.
We elected to chase the 29G and catch it somewhere north of Attic Junction. That turned out to be at a crossing along a township road where there was a home next to the tracks.
The homeowner was out mowing the grass. The guy has a great view of NS operations here, but I wonder, is he a railfan? He hardly looked up as the 29G came past. It was just another train.
For some time I’ve been wanting to make a photograph of a Norfolk Southern train passing the Willoughby Coal & Supply building on the north edge of downtown Willoughby.
I’ve seen a number of images made here and it seems like nearly every railroad photographer in Northeast Ohio has photographed the scene except me.
The building is a red brick structure that is said to be haunted. On the day that I made the image shown above a school group from the Orange schools was making a field trip here for a ghost walk.
The building is listed among the top 10 in the book America’s Most Haunted and described listed in Haunted Willoughby, Ohio by Cathi Weber.
The structure was built in 1893 as a flour mill and the haunted tale stems from the 1947 mysterious death of its owner.
The building has housed a number of businesses over the years with the current owner selling to the sewer and masonry industry since 1955.
Photographing here is pretty straight forward. The scene works best with an eastbound train in the morning and you stand on the south side of the tracks on the sidewalk for Erie Street.
Shown is NS train 316, a Bellevue to Buffalo manifest freight that on this particular day was led by a Canadian Pacific unit.
In this second installment of the trip that Akron Railroad Club member Ed Ribinskas took to Pennsylvania last month, we join him at Horseshoe Curve on the Pittsburgh Line of Norfolk Southern.
Ed was there along with his brother in law Karl and his son Owen. They made a day trip to the curve and the Everett Railroad.
While on the curve, Ed photographed Amtrak westbound train No. 43, the Pennsylvanian. It had its standard Amfleet consist pulled by a single P42DC locomotive.
No. 43 passed on the curve an NS manifest freight had had the Savannah & Atlanta heritage unit (No. 1065) in the motive power consist.
It was already starting to get dark when I arrived in Olmsted Falls. It has been an unusually warm January day and traffic on the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern was unusually heavy. Almost all of it was going westbound.
What had brought me there was the promise of seeing the Lehigh Valley heritage unit. I had seen it just once before, back in 2012, in Olmsted Falls. But it had been trailing.
I got the LV H unit and waited for the train to pass. There was some sunset color to the west so I decided to see what I could do with it.
To my surprise and delight, I caught the blinking red light of the EOT just at the right time.
It created a starburst effect that provided a nice contrast with the shadows of the train against the last light of day.
The Fort Wayne Line of Norfolk Southern crosses the Beaver River in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
For those unfamiliar with the area, this is north of Conway Yard near Pittsburgh and even north of Rochester, Pennsylvania.
For those who may be wondering what motive power was pulling this westbound intermodal train, if you regularly follow this blog you’ve seen it already.
It was the Pennsylvania Railroad heritage unit. Now here is the rest of the train crossing the river.
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