As this is written most of the colorful fall foliage has turned brown and dropped to the ground. Some trees continue to display fall color, but autumn color peaked weeks ago.
The fall foliage window is small, sometimes only a few days. Seemingly overnight trees can lose their leaves or be stripped bare by wind and rain.
Shown above is Norfolk Southern Train 25A passing beneath a colorful canopy of leaves in Springport, Indiana, on the New Castle District.
My next stop on my Pennsylvania fall foliage tour was the East Broad Top/Rockhill Trolley Museum in Orbisonia.
The trolley museum was also running pumpkin patch specials while EBT was running regular trips behind diesel M7.
Three streetcars were in use. Cars 355 and 311 both from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Car 163 from York, Pennsylvania, were running.
I focused more on the trolleys as the sun angles were too harsh to chase the EBT train.
I did get a good photo when they were turning M7 on the wye shared with the trolley museum. There was one tree perfectly situated for getting trains in the photo, so I focused on that mainly.
Article and Photographs by Todd Dillon
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.
What a month October 2005 was for the ARRC.
It was just coincidence that the first two Canadian National trains I saw while railfanning the Champaign Subdivision on Nov. 7 were led by Union Pacific motive power. UP units are, in my experience, not unusual on this stretch of CN although I don’t see them during every visit to the former Illinois Central mainline.
In train in the top image was following Amtrak’s southbound Saluki. The train in the bottom image was the first train I photographed on this outing. In both instance a tree next to the tracks made a handy way to work some fall color into the images.
The top image was made on the west side of the tracks and the bottom photograph on the east side in Pesotum, Illinois.
My quest for fall foliage continued last Sunday with a trip to the Champaign Subdivision of Canadian National, the former Illinois Central mainline between Chicago and New Orleans.
I found some colorful trees next to the tracks in Pesotum, Illinois, and worked with them.
Shown here is Amtrak’s northbound and southbound Saluki, which operates daily between Chicago and Carbondale, Illinois, and is funded by the Illinois Department of Transportation.
For more than a year the Saluki has operated with Superliner equipment and due to a CN-required minimum axle count carries more cars than does the Capitol Limited.
Although the southbound train is shown in the top image, it was the second of the two trains to pass my position.
Hickory Street in Warsaw, Indiana, is famous for two blocks of street running on the Marion District of Norfolk Southern, which many railfans still like to call the Marion Branch.
A street project that wrapped up earlier this year changed the traffic patterns on Hickory for vehicles but not for trains. The street is now one lane northbound only with the other lane devoted to on-street parking.
Last Friday I chased the 13Q from Goshen to Warsaw with the objective of getting some fall foliage and street running. There were no colorful trees on Hickory itself, but a pair of tees with gold leaves were visible on Fort Wayne Avenue. The latter comes into Hickory at an angle on the north end of the street running at the crossing of East Main Street.
The 13Q, which was led by a Canadian National unit and had a CN unit on the rear as a DPU, is shown in the top image. However, the first train I saw run down the street was the 14J, whose rear is shown about to clear the street running in the bottom image.
Note that in theory through vehicles are prohibited on the tracks and in the easternmost lane. But during my time waiting for trains I saw a number of vehicles straddle the rails while waiting at the stop light to make a left turn onto Fort Wayne Avenue.
I wasn’t expecting to find any colorful fall foliage when I set out in mid November to chase trains on the Champaign Subdivision of Canadian National in east central Illinois.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find some maple trees still showing off their October best.
Better yet they formed a line of fall foliage along the former Illinois Central mainline.
Shown above is a southbound grain train passing through Pesotum, Illinois.
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