Do you remember the westbound afternoon Penn Central mail train on the ex-Pennsylvania Railroad mainline? It was well-known for having a mixture of PRR, New York Central, and PC E-units. Here it is in September of 1972 passing Fairhope Tower in Canton. The lead unit is PC E-7A 4211. As for the grain, I’m sorry about that, but this was taken on Agfachrome film.
It took more than four decades, but a small group of former Penn Central Railroad employees in Cleveland and their heirs finally won a legal battle against the railroad.
The group shared a multi-million-dollar award in a lawsuit that claimed that Penn Central cheated them out of their seniority and health care benefits.
This past July, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati made one last ruling in favor of the workers, bringing an end to what one judge called “a Dickensian odyssey through the legal system.”
The case began when 32 railroad workers sued Penn Central in 1969 in U.S. District Court in Cleveland.
Penn Central filed for bankruptcy protection on June 21, 1970, in what at the time was the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history.
After the bankruptcy proceedings were resolved, the assets of Penn Central were divided and the lawsuit filed by the Cleveland area workers was assigned to Cincinnati-based American Premier Underwriters, owned by industrialist Carl Lindner.
Judges and arbitrators kept ruling in favor of the workers, but the company kept offering counter-arguments and the case continued to crawl through the courts.
Had Penn Central settled with the workers when the case was filed more than 40 years ago, its total payout would have been – adjusted for inflation – a little more than $500,000. But over the course of four decades the interest inflated it to nearly $15 million.
The case began when Penn Central sought to cut costs by reducing its labor force.
Phil Franz, who had worked for 14 years in the accounting office, said that he was demoted with little warning.
“I was assigned a job from 11 at night until 7 in the morning,” he told Ideastream media in Cleveland. “The guy who was assigned to me as a boss had one year’s seniority with the railroad and didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was supposed to do.”
Attorney Charles Tricarichi filed the lawsuit on behalf of the workers. When Penn Central went bankrupt a year later he knew that the case wasn’t going to be resolved quickly.
Some 10 years after the case began, Tricarichi’s daughter, Carla, joined the legal team, right out of law school.
“I became a lawyer 30 years ago, so this case has followed me throughout my career,” she told Ideastream.
“I think that they thought that they would continue to throw roadblocks in our way and that would discourage us. And frankly, it was very discouraging, and it was very expensive.”
The lawsuit took a lot of money and she spent much time traveling to out-of-state hearings and combing through dusty document repositories.
“In addition to being away, and having my kids say, ‘Oh, is it the railroad case again?’, I could not sustain the cost on my normal income, so my husband and I took out an equity line of credit on our house, so that we could pay for the expenses,” Carla Tricarichi said.
Virginia’s McNabb’s father worked in railroad yards in Cleveland his entire career. He died in 1989 at age 79, but his daughter continued the fight on behalf of his clients.
“My dad worked hard. He taught me: If you go to work and you do right by them, they are going to do right by you,” Virginia McNabb said.
She was a teenager when the case began and she said she never thought the case would take this long. There were times when she became discouraged.
“How could you win a case that just kept going and going?” she said. “I didn’t have much hope.
For a century, the railroads had been corporate super powers and in 1969 Penn Central was one of the biggest.”
But last month the plaintiffs or their heirs reached the end of the line when they received checks that represented their share of the award.
Carla Tricarichi said the memory of her dad helped sustain her as she spent years on the case and spent countless miles traveling to hearings and document repositories.
“With the exception of two workers, none of the original people — including the lawyers — have survived to see the end of the case,” she said. “For us, I guess it’s a great result. But, it’s a little bit of a loss, too, because you have this adversary, and it sort of consumes you. So, we have to, sort of, move away from that.”
Most of the former right of way of the Lake Erie & Pittsburgh is now a hiking and biking trail. The trail is shown crossing over Barlow Road.
The right of way of the Lake Erie & Pittsburgh railroad is today mainly a hiking and biking trail, but it used to be an important link in the area’s transportation system.
The LE&P was a paper railroad. It existed legally but had no equipment. Everything was supplied by the New York Central, which owned it.
Built around 1910, the LE&P ran from Marcy in Cleveland to a connection with the Pennsylvania Railroad at Brady Lake. From there trains ran on trackage rights either to Alliance and Minerva, or to Ravenna where they got on the Baltimore & Ohio to go to Niles Junction.
From there trains went back to the PRR until reaching the Lake Erie & Eastern (another paper railroad) at Girard. The Lake Erie & Eastern took the trains across Youngstown into the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie yards at Struthers, Ohio.
This was quite a confusing arrangement but it made for a direct Cleveland-Youngstown route for both the NYC and PRR.
The B&O between Ravenna and Niles Junction had trains of the NYC and Pennsylvania railroads as well as its own. That must have been a sight. Also, the LE&P had PRR trains using it as well.
The story doesn’t end there, however. The LE&P originally planned to build from Cleveland to Lorain on a routing that would take it through Berea just south of the current Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern.
This was never completed but it was graded and bridge piers were constructed over the east and west branches of the Rocky River. These piers still stand.
The LE&P was busy until the Penn Central merger. It was quickly abandoned and torn up with only a two-mile siding from Brady Lake to serve Hugo Sand near Twin Lakes and the Akron water treatment plant. The grade of the route was level, but it hugged the east side of the Cuyahoga Valley. Many tall steel bridges were required to cross Marcy, Tinkers Creek and Brandywine Creek
These bridges required heavy maintenance that Penn Central could not afford.
The ex-PRR mainline paralleled the LE&P just a few miles east and had signaled double track as opposed to the single-track dark territory of the LE&P.
Throw in the automotive plants located on the Pennsy and it was a no brainer for Penn Central’s management team to favor that route over the LE&P.
I was able to photograph a Conrail local on the ex-LE&P in 1989 switching the remaining track at Brady Lake. NS served this branch for while, but I have not seen any trains on it in about four years now.
There were plenty of trees along the last segment of the ex-LE&P that was used by Conrail and later Norfolk Southern.
A pair of Conrail GP38-2s was typical power for a local freight.
Bringing up the rear is bay window caboose 21313, N21 class. Interstingly, the N21 class 21202-21313 built by Conrail in 1978 was the last of that order. These were the only cabooses that were built for Conrail.
The LE&P diverged from the ex-PRR at Brady Lake tower. The westbound track rose in elevation until crossing over the Pennsy on this bridge located just west of Lake Rockwell Road. The eastbound track is visible at the far left.
The former eastbound main of the LE&P is still extant, joining the NS main nearly beneath the Lake Rockwell Road overpass. A westbound NS manifest freight passes the junction.
A map of the former New York Central Cleveland Division shows the former LE&P and the trackage rights arrangement that the NYC had to reach Youngstown from Cleveland.
Brady Lake tower still stands inside the Tower’s Woods Park in Portage County.
The former LE&P right of way, now a trail, in a view looking west from Ohio Route 91.
For some time I’ve been wondering when I would be out on a railfan outing, be in place to photograph an NS train and realize as I’m looking through my lens that a heritage locomotive is on the point of that approaching train. I finally realized that dream on Sunday morning.
I was at Brady Lake, poised to photograph a westbound train when I realized that the lead unit was NS 1073, the Penn Central unit.
It seemed to be appropriate that the PC unit was pulling a coke train. During PC’s short life, the rust belt of America was still very much alive although not so well. Penn Central must have had thousands of trains such as this one that served steel mills, many of which are now gone.
The scene at Brady Lake is also a throwback to the early 1970s. Yeah, the NS tracks are in much better condition than the the Penn Central tracks were. The former Erie Lackawanna bridge to the left of the bottom image shows a little more rust and has had one of its two tracks removed. But use your imagination a little bit and it feels like you’ve gone back in a time machine.
It is almost a requirement that if you are in Bellevue photographing trains that you must visit the streamlined passenger locomotive sitting at the far north end of the property of the Mad River & NKP Museum.
Rusting away on a spur track is former New York Central E8A No. 4070, still wearing its Penn Central markings as No. 4321.
Built in June 1953, the 4070 pulled intercity passenger trains for two decades until Penn Central placed it in commuter service in New York City. New Jersey Transit also briefly operated the locomotive.
For a while, the locomotive sat in Logansport, Ind., before being moved to Bellevue in 1996 on the rear of a Norfolk Southern freight train.
On Friday (May 25), while in Bellevue with Ed Ribinskas and Jeff Troutman, I caught the NS 184 with a CN SD70M-2 in the lead passing the PC 4321 on the adjacent NS Toledo District.
The two locomotives were a few hundred feet apart, but the distance was far wider than that in several other respects.
CN 8885 is an SD70M-2 that is the DC traction version of the SD70Ace. Production of the SD70M-2 began in 2005 and CN has 190 of these units on its roster.
The SD70M-2 prime mover is rated at 4,300 horsepower and the unit has all of the bells and whistles that you would expect a modern locomotive to have.
Both locomotives are EMD products, but the similarities end there.
Still, for one moment in time on a windy Friday afternoon, they bridged the gap of several motive power generations.
Akron Railroad Club president Craig Sanders’ latest book, Canton Area Railroads, has been released by Arcadia Publishing. The book was written in cooperation with the Akron Railroad Club and features photographs from club members Richard Antibus, John Beach, Michael Boss, Peter Bowler, Richard Jacobs, Chris Lantz, James McMullen, Bob Redmond, Edward Ribinskas, Marty Surdyk and Paul Vernier.
The book chronicles the history and development of the railroads that served Stark, Wayne, Holmes, Carroll and Tuscarawas counties. Among the cities coverd are Canton, Massillon, Alliance, Orrville, Wooster, Dover, New Philadelphia, Dennison, Brewster, Navarre, Minerva and Sugar Creek.
Canton Area Railroads documents how railroad operations changed as the steel industry declined and railroad consolidations led to traffic shifts and route abandonments. Among the railroads that served this region were the Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central and Wheeling & Lake Erie. The book has images of these roads plus their sucessors Penn Central, Norfolk & Western, Conrail, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Ohio Central, R.J. Corman and OhiRail.
Also discussed are modern passenger operations Amtrak, the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad and the Orrville Railroad Heritage Society. The book is 128 pages and has more than 200 photographs.
Canton Area Railroads is the fifth railroad history book published by Sanders. His other works include Akron Railroads, Amtrak in the Heartland, Limiteds, Locals and Expresses in Indiana, 1838-1971, and Mattoon and Charleston Area Railroads.
The ARRC will be selling copies of Canton Area Railroads at train shows and at its monthly meetings. The book is also available from booksellers and the publisher (www.arcadiapublishing.com).
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