It was a sunny October Sunday in 2010. I was out with Roger Durfee and we had in mind catching some action on the CSX New Castle Subdivision.
Roger learned somehow that a westbound CSX coal train had a Kansas City Southern leader. Then, as now, KCS motive power was not unheard of in Northeast Ohio, but it wasn’t that common, either.
Roger turned his Jeep eastward and we intercepted the train at Newton Falls, seen in the top image. From there we photographed the coal train in at least three other places. Akron wasn’t one of them, probably because urban traffic would result in our not being able to keep pace with the train.
On the point was KCS AC44CW No. 4594 in the gray livery with yellow nose stripes that had been built by GE in November 1999. The trailing unit was a BNSF “pumpkin”
We chased that train to east of Greenwich, where it stopped to wait for traffic ahead to clear.
Among our other photo locations were Nova and River Corners Road west of Lodi, with the latter being seen in the bottom image above.
It was one of the longest chases of a single train that I’ve been involved with on the New Castle Sub. It also was kinda fun and made more exhilarating by bagging something that I seldom had been able to catch during my various railfan outings in Northeast Ohio.
The fall foliage we found along the tracks wasn’t too bad, either.
I was looking in my slide collection earlier this week with an emphasis on images made on the Cleveland Line of Norfolk Southern in the vicinity of Brady Lake and Ravenna when I ran across the image shown above.
Seeing it brought back a lot of memories of a late October day, Oct. 28, 2005, to be exact.
I was in my first year as president of the Akron Railroad Club. It was a Friday and the October meeting was that night in the Carriage House of the Summit County Historical Society.
Before the meeting Ed Ribinskas and I got in some late day railfanning around Ravenna.
As you can see in this image the fall foliage along the Cleveland Line east of Lake Street was at peak color although some of the trees had already lost most or all of their leaves.
We were there in late afternoon and fortunate to get two westbounds before the shadows completely covered the rails.
As it was, the shadows were rapidly moving in, which turned out to be a good thing by creating some dramatic contrast. Contrast helps to give an image visual tension, which increases its drama and interest.
It is noteworthy that as dramatic as these images are they are not the photographs I remember the most from this outing.
Those images were made several minutes later on the CSX New Castle Subdivision at Chestnut Street.
In the last direct sunlight of the day we caught a westbound with a BNSF leader. I framed it with a Baltimore & Ohio color position light signal and the block sign denoting the end and beginning of the Kent and Rave blocks.
The warm light on a BNSF “pumpkin” was, I thought at the time, the catch of the day.
CSX has long since dropped the use of blocks on the New Castle Sub and the CPLs have been gone for years. So those photos now make nice period pieces.
Curious as to who had the program that night I dug out the October 2005 Bulletin. The program was titled Now and Then with the “now” being presented by Marty Surdyk and the “then” being shown by his father, the late William Surdyk.
The photographs shown were made roughly 40 years apart and used different types of slide film.
Marty’s images were 35 mm slides shown in a Kodak Carousel projector.
He featured the Bessemer & Lake Erie, CSX in the Akron area, Marion, Berea and the Wheeling & Lake Erie around Spencer.
Bill’s images were 2.25-inch format slides shown in a 1950s era Goldie projector that could be fed one slide at a time. In Bill’s show were images from Berea, Marion and Akron among other locations.
The meeting minutes for October reported that a record 18 members went to the Eat ‘n Park in Cuyahoga Falls after the meeting for dessert, a late dinner or an early breakfast.
The next day ARRC members gathered again, this time in Berea to dedicate the Dave McKay memorial.
A week before the meeting, ARRC members had enjoyed an excursion on the Ohio Central between Dennison and Morgan Run. It was supposed to have been pulled by 2-8-0 Baldwin-built No. 33.
But the steamer was sidelined with mechanical issues. Instead, a Montreal Locomotive Works RS18 pulled the trip to Morgan Run while an OC FP7 powered the return trip.
akronrrclub.wordpress.com 