Watch Trains While You Fish

I wasn’t at the Attica Reservoir to go fishing, but if I had been I could also have watched some trains on the adjacent Sandusky District of Norfolk Southern.

An eastbound manifest freight gets underway after waiting for a while north of here at Attica Junction for CSX to allow NS to run traffic.

But this train would not be going to much further. NS traffic had halted due to a stuck switch in Bucyrus that a maintainer was working on and traffic was backing up.

On some days railroading, like fishing, calls for an abundant amount of patience.

Pleased to Visit With You Miss Caroline

For a short time the water was calm enough to get a decent reflection shot. Shown is NS westbound manifest train 180.

I’ve driven past the Attica resevoirs at Caroline along the Sandusky District of Norfolk Southern many times, but I’d never stopped at the southernmost one.

I had seen photographs that Marty Surdyk has taken over the years at Caroline, but never made any images there myself until last June when we stopped there while chasing trains during the Akron Railroad Club’s longest day outing.

Nearly two months after that outing, I returned to Caroline with fellow ARRC member Peter Bowler.

Our goal was to get some reflection images of NS trains on the water of the reservoir. That was a challenge due to the windy conditions that whipped up the water and that direct sunlight was a hit and mostly miss proposition.

But we had not driven all this way to go home empty handed. We worked with what we had.

We had a situation in which NS had trains backed up waiting to cross the CSX diamonds at Attica Junction.

That junction is controlled by CSX and I can only imagine some of the telephone conversations that went on between CSX and NS officials as they tried to look out for the interests of their respective employers.

It was during the midst of the service issues that CSX was having last summer.

Not only were NS trains getting backed up at Attica Junction, but so were lesser priority CSX trains and/or those that Willard was not yet ready to handle.

In time, trains finally moved even if not as efficiently as everyone wanted.

 

The water wasn’t quite still enough to get a sharp reflection.

Once NS trains got the OK to go through Attica Junction they tended to run in pairs. Here the eastbound 195 passes the westbound 29G.

Detroit-bound stack train 29G cools its heels south of Caroline waiting for CSX to allow NS to run trains through Attica Junction.

At last NS stack train 29G has heard the word from the dispatch to come down to Attica Junction looking for a signal.

A westbound CSX manifest freight has the signal at Attica Junction. The view is looking northward to the east of the diamonds.

Making a Mad Dash For the Bridge

I’m told that federal regulations give commercial traffic priority on the Cuyahoga River at the Drawbridge carrying the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern over the waterway in Cleveland.

But during warm weather months, most boats on the river are pleasure craft and the bridge tender does not have to lift the bridge to accommodate them until rail traffic is out of the way.

Sept. 24 saw temperatures soar into lower 90s, breaking a record for the date of 88 degrees set in 2007.

Needless to say, the onset of summer weather in the early days of what is officially autumn has boaters out in droves.

But NS had trains to run and all the boaters could do was idle in place or run around in circles as four trains went by.  But once rail traffic cleared and the bridge began going up, the boaters didn’t wait for it to reach its peak position.

As soon as clearances allowed, the boaters began making a mad dash toward the lake or from the lake as seen here.

Boats and NS Trains in Vermilion

If you like to watch boats, Vermilion is a good place to go. If you like to watch trains, Vermilion is a good place to be.

But it is not an either-or choice if you plan a visit to the city on the shore of Lake Erie that is also noted as being the home of a famous French restaurant.

If you hang out at the South Street boat launch on the Vermilion River you can see trains and boats at the same time.

The Akron Railroad Club recently had its annual day in Vermilion and we spent all morning and part of the afternoon at the boat launch.

Here is a look at some of the action involving boats and trains.

I Wasn’t Sure What to Expect

One in a periodic series of images I made last summer

Peter Bowler had a vision that I was having a hard time grasping. He wanted to get a Norfolk Southern train or two crossing Sandusky Bay west of Sandusky in early morning light.

But to get the image that he wanted would require having to leave very early in the morning, like 4 a.m. I wasn’t enthusiastic about that.

We instead drove to Toledo with the idea of getting a train crossing the Maumee River. Alas, the bridge over the NS tracks carrying Miami Street was closed due to construction.

So we wound up at Sandusky Bay to try the photograph what Peter had originally envisioned.

I’ve been to Sandusky Bay a few times, but don’t know the territory that well. I got it in my head that we would standing almost next to the tracks and shooting an eastbound train coming toward us.

But that wasn’t what Peter had in mind and there probably isn’t a place to to that without trespassing on railroad or private property.

Instead, we found ourselves on an old road that juts into the bay and is used for fishing. It can also be used for photographing trains if you have a good telephoto lens.

By the time we got to the bay, the lighting conditions were pretty brutal. We were looking almost right into the late morning sun.

I immediately understood why Peter initially had said we’d have to leave so early.

So I did what I always do, which is the best I can with what I have to work with. It didn’t yield any spectacular images, but it did result in a keeper or two.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders