Catching 3 on the Wheeling & Lake Erie

An unidentified Wheeling & Lake Erie train at Wellington.

The same train seen above at Spencer.

Train 291 east of Spencer.

Train 261 in Akron.

I started Saturday by going to Willard trying to catch the new CSX Operation Lifesaver unit. Unfortunately, it went west about 20 minutes before I arrived.

I then went to Bellevue for a few hours and caught about 10 Norfolk Southern trains.  On the way home I followed the Wheeling Lake Erie Hartland Subdivision.

Stopping in Hartland, I found a couple of parked engines but no activity. Continuing to Wellington, an eastbound train was sitting just west of the Lorain County Fairgrounds.

Assuming it was waiting for clearance to cross the CSX Greenwich Subdivision, I waited east of the diamonds.  After a CSX train went west it quickly came, making a lot of smoke in doing so.

I chased this train to Spencer where it continued on to Brewster. I got word on social media that a 291 was coming west from Medina.

I set up at a crossing east of Spencer and caught this train.  I then proceeded to Akron where I caught 261 with seven engines doubling back into the yard.

Not a bad finish for a less than promising start to the day.

Article and Photographs by Todd Dillon

W&LE EMD Lease Units Two for Tuesday

Today’s two for Tuesday features a pair of Wheeling & Lake Erie trains in Spencer from April 12, 2014. Both units worked for EMD leasing before winding up on the Wheeling where they ran around for years in their blue and white EMD livery. Both locomotives are SD40-2 models. The 6314 is still on the Wheeling motive power roster and still wearing the livery seen above. The 6382 is off the Wheeling’s roster.

Photographs by Robert Farkas

W&LE Receives ORDC Grant for Spencer Project

The Wheeling & Lake Erie will receive a $490,626 grant from the Ohio Rail Development Commission for track work on four subdvisions.

In a news release,  ORDC said the grant will fund a reconfiguration of connecting tracks among the Hartland, Akron, Brewster and Carey subdivisions in Spencer.

The ORDC grant matches a $6.8 million federal Consolidated Railroad Infrastructure and Safety Improvement awarded to the project last month.

The project is designed to alleviate traffic congestion while increasing operational fluidity, ORDC officials said in a press release.

In a related development, ORDC approved a $50,000 grant to Renewable Lubricants to help develop a transload facility in Kent that will be served by the Akron Barberton Cluster Railway.

The facility will be located in southwest Kent and involves various input oils that will be shipped by rail and transferred to truck for final movement to Hartville. 

The facility project’s total cost will be $600,000. The facility will have two spurs and a total capacity of 20 to 30 rail cars. ABC is a W&LE subsidiary.

2 Ohio Rail Projects Awarded CRISI Grants

Two Ohio railroad projects have been awarded Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement grants.

The grants are being awarded by the Federal Railroad Administration, which said 46 projects in 32 states and the District of Columbia will share $368 million in CRISI grants.

In a news release, the FRA said the projects are designed to improve and expand passenger-rail service and fund conventional and high-speed rail lines, as well as increase supply-chain resilience and fluidity, support short lines, invest in new technology and safety advancements and benefit rail industry workforce development and training activities.

In Ohio, the Wheeling & Lake Erie Spencer Connection Project will receive up to $6,868,768 to be used to construct a new connecting track and extension of yard tracks in Spencer.

The project goal is to eliminate switching movements and allow trains to directly access the yard from the Brewster and Akron subdivisions.

Work will include construction of a third connecting track between the two subdivisions and construction of eastward extensions of the existing transfer and pass tracks.

This work will include new turnouts and track relocations, as well as new ballast and drainage improvements. The revised layout will eliminate a number of reversing movements for trains and expand overall capacity.

The Ohio Rail Development Commission and W&LE will provide a 30 percent match.

In Cincinnati, the River Road Highway/Rail Grade Crossing Safety Improvements will receive up to $6,067,200.

The project will make safety improvements to four crossings on CSX and Central Railroad of Indiana including new signal equipment. The City of Cincinnati will provide a 20 percent match.

Two CRISI grants went to rail projects in Michigan.

The Great Lakes Corridor Improvement will receive up to $21.3 million, to rehabilitate track and rail assets of the Great Lakes Central.

Work will involve rebuilding track just north of Ann Arbor, including installing 4.25 miles of new rail, eliminating joints on an additional 41.25 miles, replacing or rehabilitating 11 bridges and culverts, and installing approximately 30,000 ties on mainline and siding track.

The project will eliminate 16 slow orders covering 45 miles of the 260-mile mainline corridor and will result in fewer track defects, derailments, and other maintenance problems associated with rail joints.

The Michigan Department of Transportation and GLC will provide a 50 percent match.

A grant of up to $8,697,910 will be used by the West Michigan Railroad for track rebuilding.

The project involves 10 miles of track in Southwest Michigan. Specific improvements include rail and cross-tie replacements, reconstructed roadbeds, bridge and turnout repairs, upgrades and replacement of two at-grade crossings, and rebuilding approximately 5.6 miles of track.

The work will upgrade portions of the line from 5 mph excepted track to at least FRA Class 2 speeds up to 25 mph and ensure the line can continue to handle 286,000-pound rail cars.

MDOT and WMR will provide a 35 percent match.

In Indiana, the Connecting the Crossroads of America project will receive up to $8,383,761 for track improvements to the Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern Railroad main line and Decatur Subdivision.

The project will replace ballast and ties along a 54-mile segment of the main line and install 115-pound rail, ties, ballast, and surfacing on a 14-mile segment of the Decatur Subdivision. Additionally, 43 at-grade crossing surfaces are to be replaced with rubber seal/asphalt design for handling heavier loads, longevity of construction, and improved efficiency of travel at crossings.

When finished, the work will enable trains to operate at higher speeds. The Indiana Department of Transportation and CF&E will provide a 51 percent match.

Also in Indiana, the Elkhart & Western will receive up to $2,618,173 to be used to relocate an interchange track with Norfolk Southern, upgrade the 9-mile Elkhart Branch line to Class 1 track safety standards, expand rail siding capacity, and replace three grade crossing surfaces within Elkhart.

This interchange will be relocated out of the city center and into an industrial area. Currently, E&W and NS track intersect two roadways, and when a train is more than nine rail cars long, it blocks the roadway for approximately 15 minutes while trains interchange cars.

The proposed track relocation would eliminate the blocked crossing and improve grade crossings with deteriorating conditions.

The project will receive a 50 percent match from the E&W, INDOT, the City of Elkhart, and the St. Joseph County Redevelopment Commission.

 In West Virginia, the Appalachian & Ohio Railroad will receive up to $1,617,824 to improve its 42-mile railroad corridor from Grafton to Buckhannon.

The project will replace an antiquated traffic control system and install a new and modern broken rail detection system on the entire signaled section of the A&O rail line. The existing traffic control system has reached the end of its useful service life. The A&O will provide a 39 percent match.

Some Wheeling Action in Spencer

Wheeling & Lake Erie SD40-3 No. 4025 pulls around the connection from the Spencer Yard to the Hartland Subdivision on Oct. 6, 2011. The 4025 wears the second W&LE “tiger stripe” livery, which features smaller roster numbers and lettering on the long hood. Originally built for the Missouri Pacific the locomotive also spent time on the Union Pacific roster.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

Shuffling in Spencer

It’s a Friday afternoon in May 2008 and I’m out doing some railfanning before tonight’s Akron Railroad Club meeting. Ed Ribinskas is along with me.

This is one of two Wheeling & Lake Erie trains we caught on this day. The train shown above has come into town on the Hartland Subdivision and its motive power has cut off and gone around the connection to the Akron Subdivision to work the yard.

For some reason the power has been separated. Perhaps one unit is being dropped here to be picked up by another train.

Later in we would catch a westbound empty stone train that we would chase as far as New London. We photographed it at Firestone Road and from the overpass on the north side of New London that goes over the CSX Greenwich Subdivision.

That train was worth chasing because it had a former Wisconsin Central unit on the point and a former Denver & Rio Grande unit tailing. But that train is for another post on another day.

What I liked about the image above is that it conveys the feel a railroad at work. As one crew member rides the lead locomotive another walks on the ground nearby wearing a hard hat and safety vest.

Cars sit in the yard tracks on both sides of the former Akron, Canton & Youngstown mainline waiting to be picked up.

There is even one of the old searchlight signals that guarded this diamond. Those signals are gone now, replaced with modern devices.

The hardware in Spencer may have changed but one thing remains constant. It’s still a place to find the railroad at work.

Article and Photograph by Craig Sanders

Before the Meeting: W&LE Iron Ore Train

The chase begins in Wellington with the Wheeling & Lake Erie iron ore train getting a clear signal to cross the CSX Greenwich Subdivision.

Somewhere between Wellington and Spencer we got the ore train again. Note the old style milepost.

You won’t find these searchlight signals in Spencer anymore.

Our last look at the iron ore train in Spencer. SD40 No. 4001 was on the rear.

Back in the day I usually would get in some railfanning before attending Akron Railroad Club meetings.

The tradition began when the late Dave McKay would suggest we hang out for a while at Voris Street in Akron before getting dinner at Steak ‘n Shake and then heading to the club meeting at the Summit County Historical Society’s carriage house.

I continued those before the meeting railfan outings after Dave’s death in December 2004 although I now had more time on meeting day and could extend my range.

On many of those outings the club’s then treasurer Ed Ribinskas was with me.

Our destinations depended on how much time we had and my interests at the moment. I shared images from some of those outings during an ARRC member’s night program in March 2019 titled Before the Meeting.

The photographs above were not part of that program, which to date is the last one I’ve given at an ARRC event.

I just scanned these slides recently as part of a project to scan my collection of slides and color negative film photographs of Wheeling & Lake Erie operations.

The date of these images is March 29, 2008. This would be the first of three before the meeting outings Ed and I made that year to catch W&LE trains.

The March outing began in Wellington where we caught a few CSX trains before an eastbound W&LE iron ore train showed up.

After getting the ore train in Wellington, we chased it out of town, photographing it once along the way and in Spencer.

The train had an all Wheeling look with an SD40 on each end and W&LE lettered hopper cars in between.

Those locomotives, Nos. 4025 and 4001, are still on the W&LE locomotive roster although they have been rebuilt to SD40-3 specifications.

Both units were built for the Missouri Pacific and operated for other railroads before the Wheeling acquired them.

A few elements in the above scenes have changed in the 13 years since these images were made. Chief among those changes is the removal of the search-light type signals in Wellington and Spencer.

You might also notice the lettering on No. 4025 is smaller than what the Wheeling uses now. The current lettering scheme is visible on trailing unit No. 4001.

Otherwise, these images are timeless and some could have been made this year.

Before driving to Akron on this day we wrapped up our outing in Sullivan where we caught a westbound train on the CSX New Castle Subdivision.

I don’t recall where we had dinner that night but a check of the ARRC Bulletin shows that the late Richard Jacobs gave the program, presenting slides of Colorado narrow gauge railroads that he made in 1992 and then various images made in 2007 in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

Variety on the Wheeling & Lake Erie

 

As anyone who has ever photographed the Wheeling & Lake Erie for any length of time knows, you never know what motive power will be on the next W&LE train that you see.

W&LE has a standard livery of black and orange with its name in speed lettering, but it also stables a fleet of locomotives it has acquired from various places and those units tend to spend a lot of time in service with whatever look they came with before being painted into the standard W&LE locomotive livery.

Such was the case with this train coming into Spencer on the Hartland Subdivision. It will drop off a few cars in the yard that are headed for Medina and then get back on its train and continue the journey to Brewster.

Making Tough Photo Selections

One of the toughest choices for me when putting together a presentation is sometimes choosing between two similar images.

Such was the case with the two images shown above of the same Wheeling & Lake Erie train made in the same location just seconds apart. I was standing by the Old Mill Road grade crossing southeast of Spencer.

The images are shown in sequence top to bottom. Both images have much in common even if their compositions are slightly different.

In the top image, what attracts me are the three poles to the right of the lead locomotive. Pole lines are rapidly vanishing from American railroads and these three poles are all that is left of a pole line along the Brewster Subdivision of the Wheeling.

So the poles add a nostalgic touch missing from the bottom image, which shows just one pole. One pole does not a pole line make.

I also like how the top image is more reflective of the rule of thirds than the bottom image. That because the focal point of the image — the nose of the lead locomotive — is near one of the intersecting points rather than in the center as is the case with the lower image.

One advantage of the top image is also one of its weaknesses. There is an unofficial “rule” in railroad photography about showing some of the track head of a train in order to give a sense of movement and direction.

Yet you don’t want to show too much track, which may be a downside of the top image. However, this is where the three poles help salvage this image by filling what otherwise would be dead space that provides no useful purpose.

The advantage that the bottom image has over the top photo is that the train is more prominent. For many railfans, the photograph is all about the train and the surrounding environment is extraneous clutter.

The bottom image also makes better use of the trees on both sides of the tracks as a framing device, enhancing the effect of the train coming out of “hole” in the forest.

The W&LE speed lettering is more visible in the bottom image although not readable.

However, the budding trees to the right of the train that proclaims “spring” is more prominent in the top image than in the bottom.

I like both of these images, but if I had to choose just one of them to put in a presentation I would probably go with the bottom image if the audience is mostly railfans.

In my experience, railfans tend to favor trains even if many of them like a good image showing the train in an environment.