ARRC to Hold Longest Day Outing in Alliance

The Akron Railroad Club has announced that it plans to hold its annual longest day outing on June 28 in Alliance.

The group will meet between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. by the Lincoln monument located just west of the former passenger station platform.

Attendees of the event will be encouraged to exchange cell phone numbers and then spread out to area locations, including Rootstown, Ravenna, Sebring, Salem or East Palestine and report train movements from their location by cell phone.

The plan is to get the same trains in different locations and share photographs of those trains during the member’s night and pizza party planned for Oct. 24.

Those attending the longest day outing will meet in Salem or Alliance that evening for dinner at a restaurant to be determined.

The longest day outing is a traditional ARRC event that is typically held at an Ohio railfan hotspot.

Past longest days have been held in Marion, Fostoria, Deshler and Bellevue.

There has been consideration given to holding the 2020 longest day in the Pittsburgh region in an effort to encourage greater participation, which has lagged in recent years.

Some Wheeling & Lake Erie in Alliance

Alliance is a Norfolk Southern town. But on a Friday afternoon before an Akron Railroad Club meeting I found a bit of the Wheeling & Lake Erie there.

Shown is one of the many W&LE hopper cars on NS train 424, which is headed toward Bayard on the original Cleveland Line.

It would not go very far. The Cleveland Line dispatcher instructed the crew to pull into the Mahoning siding and wait for a westbound.

I never saw the westbound as I had left to go have dinner and then attend the ARRC meeting.

Way Too Early for Amtrak

It would be nice to be able to use the Amtrak station signs in Alliance to frame the Capitol Limited arriving into the station.

But No. 29 is scheduled in at 1:39 a.m. and No. 30 at 3:05 a.m. Given Amtrak’s habit of being tardy at intermediate stations, it probably doesn’t happen often that either train arrives at exactly those times.

I’ve yet to be in Alliance railfanning in the middle of the night and I’ve never had any luck getting Amtrak arriving in Alliance several hours late.

So framing a Norfolk Southern westbound stack train at the Amtrak station is the next best thing.

These images were made on the afternoon of the January Akron Railroad Club meeting.

Look Ma, No Wide Cabs

Wide cab locomotives are ubiquitous on North America’s Class 1 Railroads. It is not necessarily rare to see a motive power consist with one or more narrow-cab locomotives, but it is not common either.

Hence, I stood up and took notice when NS C80 showed up in Alliance with three narrow cab units. It was a light power move and I’m not sure why this power was in town.

The locomotives came in on Track 2, stopped west of the home signal for CP Alliance, and then moved onto the runner before vanishing off to the east.

After the crew tied the units down, it was picked up by a crew van whose driver had a tough time finding the crew even with the assistance of a GPS.

The individual units have some interesting history behind them. All three were on the Conrail motive power roster with two of them having been built for CR.

RP-E4C No. 712 was rebuilt by NS from a GP38 that was built for Penn Central. SD40E No. 6347 was rebuilt from an SD50 built for Conrail. In the middle of the consist was GP40-2 No. 3014.

 

Remembering Conrail on its 40th Anniversary

Today is the 40th anniversary of Conrail’s creation and I will take us back to a day in 1999 at Alliance.

At the time I lived in Indiana but one summer afternoon I found myself at Alliance for a couple hours. This was the summer just after the takeover by Norfolk Southern and CSX, both lines in Alliance becoming part of Norfolk Southern.

There was still a lot of Conrail power and much hadn’t even been renumbered as yet so it still had a Conrail feel even if the railroad was NS property now.

About a half dozen freight train passed through as well as the east and westbound Amtrak Pennsylvanian which still went to Chicago. That would end in another year or so leaving the Capitol Limited as the only Amtrak service.

I also had photographed a pair of GP38 helpers at Canton yard earlier that day.

Hard to believe that it’s been almost 17 years since that day and 40 years since Conrail’s creation. Happy 40th Conrail.

Article and photographs by Todd Dillon