New York Central Nos. 7364 and 7311 are in Painesville on Oct. 2, 1969. This is a year and a half after the Penn Central merger took place. If you look carefully at the caboose, though, you’ll see it has a PC logo and lettering.
Do you realize that VIA Rail Canada took its FPA-4 locomotives out of service 30 years ago? Yet two of them were on the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad’s National Park Scenic train last Saturday.
The top and middle images were taken in Peninsula while the bottom photograph was made in Akron as Baltimore & Ohio No. 800 was being towed north.
Was it really 49 years ago that I took this photo of my first Montreal Locomotive Works FPA-4? Here is a photo that still brings a smile. Canadian National 6786 is at the station in London, Ontario, on November 30, 1968. Mike Ondecker, John Woodworth and I had originally intended to go to Toledo on Nov. 29 for an overnight stay but finished there and spent the night in London were this was taken.
Norfolk & Western Nos. 3697, 3717, and 3712 are at Brewster outside the N&W diesel shop in the late 1960s. Although the N&W had no F units of its own, these Fs are ex-Wabash.
Here is another memory for the blog. A Baltimore & Ohio trailer train heads east through Kent in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The Erie Lackawanna passenger station can be seen on the hill in the middle left. Notice all the jointed rail that was normal back then.
An Erie Lackawanna Alco FA and Alco RS-3 are eastbound leaving the EL Kent yard in the late 1960s. This photo is from the north side of the tracks and not the more commonly photographed south side. Notice, also, the light tower, bridges and semaphore signal.
I was going through some glassine envelopes of negatives and found this. Illinois Central No. 4035 is in Centralia, Illinois, in August 1970. The Train name/number are unknown to me.
John Woodworth, Mike Ondecker, and I were in Centralia to photograph IC passenger trains. I never guessed that in less than a year there would no longer be IC passenger trains.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
Norfolk & Western No. 8201 is Brewster-bound in June 1982. Here she is traveling west approaching Harmon. (Photograph by Robert Farkas)
At the beginning of the Penn Central era — around 1968/1969, former New York Central No. 8073 (a Baldwin road switcher) worked out of Canton Yard on the former Pennsylvania Railroad. Here she is with one of Canton’s steel mills for a background.
The early years of Conrail were most interesting and colorful as locomotives wearing predecessor railroads were mixed and matched in train consists.
For a time, some units wore continued to wear their former colors with Conrail markings.
Conrail 6074 leads a pair of eastbound helpers through the super-elevated curve in front of the ex-Pennsylvania Railroad passenger station in Massillon, Ohio on Aug. 17, 1981.
