Here are two from Jan. 31, 2015. In the top image CSX 918 leads a westbound in Clinton. This sunny view is generally unphotographable at any other time of year because of the shadows from the trees and brush when they have leaves on them.
In the bottom image, CSX 385 is on the point of a westbound in Clinton that will soon pass Warwick Park, the site of many Akron Railroad Club picnics over the years.
Photographs by Robert Farkas
It was the late 1960s when Mike Ondecker and I found westbound Baltimore & Ohio E8A No. 1447 with The Diplomat at the Akron Union Depot. The train on the left is an eastbound Erie Lackawanna freight. No. 1447 was built by EMD in October 1953 as B&O 26A. It would later work for Amtrak wearing roster numbers 203 and 353.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
Friday and Saturday were the type of days I will not venture out anymore except to the mailbox and to feed the birds.
Why I didn’t really need to go trackside is because I am more than satisfied with the results I got in Perry in March 2013 in similar conditions. However, things were worse on Friday than they were in March 2013 when there was heavy lake effect snow but not the extreme cold.
Of course I wouldn’t have been able to see Amtrak No. 48 anyway if I had gone out since it was cancelled. Stay warm everyone.
Article and Photographs by Edward Ribinskas
It is late afternoon on Jan. 10, 2015. I’m standing on the bridge carrying Old State Road over the CSX Willard Terminal Subdivision tracks west of Greenwich.
Cresting a grade and heading toward Willard is CSX manifest freight Q351. I had first spotted this train southeast of New London on the New Castle Subdivision but had been out of position to get a decent photograph. I was able to get ahead of it and catch it here.
The attraction of the train was is bright red and clean Canadian Pacific leader which gleams in the late afternoon sunlight while providing some contrast with the snow and drab colors of the slumbering foliage along the tracks.
The image is a reminder of the rewards of winter photography when low sun angles produce warm light on otherwise cold days.
Article and Photograph by Craig Sanders
An eastbound Baltimore & Ohio merchandise train in Kent has just passed the passenger station behind me. The Erie Lackawanna passenger station is up the hill to the right. It is the late 1960s/early 1970s, so this image is more than 50 years old.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
Last Saturday (Feb. 5) I spent the day in Alliance.
Upon arriving I found an eastbound intermodal sitting on Track No. 1 and another eastbound moving slowly on Track No. 2.
The reason for this soon became apparent as train 14N was sitting on Track 1 blocking every railroad crossing in town. It had broken several air hoses and had gone into emergency.
Also sitting on Track 2 east of town was the 170 waiting to go west. The slowly moving EB train was taking the runner track, a long siding for parking trains, to get around the 170.
After about an hour, the 14N was able to get moving and continue east; However it would need a new crew before reaching Conway.
Once the 14N cleared, the 170 was able to continue west. The 170 takes the Fort Wayne line to Canton and 14N was blocking his move.
The 170 crew was also on short time and ended up tying down at Freshley Road west of town.
Other trains had backed up behind the 14N including 64N an oil or ethanol train.
This train then took the Alliance runner previously used by the intermodal and tied down to wait for a new crew.
A little later train 6K4, another oil or ethanol, took the Cleveland single and tied down on the Mahoning siding south of town.
An empty coal train came an hour or so later, which picked up this crew. The 6K4 had a GP38-3 leading some Canadian National engines, which was interesting.
Another train that I had hoped to get was the 171 which had the Virginian heritage unit. Alas it sat in Canton all afternoon before getting a new crew and going through Alliance about 5 p.m. I had left by then.
Article and Photographs by Todd Dillon
Most of the images Ed Ribinskas has made of the former Nickel Plate Road trestle over the Grand River in Painesville were made at the east end of the bridge.
He stayed away from the west end for several years to avoid trespassing on the property of Coe Manufacturing. Another factor was that it would be a tight shot because of tree growth that dated back to the end of the steam locomotive era.
After Coe Manufacturing closed and its building were razed, Ed felt more comfortable scouting for photo angles at the west end.
Nonetheless, it was still a tight shot. The best time of year to photograph the west end of the trestle was during the winter.
“Probably the very few times I photographed there resulted in my best and favorites,” Ed wrote.
The bottom two photographs were made of westbound manifest freight 145 at about 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 2, 2014 (Super Bowl Sunday).
With Ed that day were fellow Akron Railroad Club members Marty Surdyk and Craig Sanders.
The top two images were made in early afternoon on May 6, 2018.
Photographs by Edward Ribinskas
For several years in late January or early February, I would get together with Ed Ribinskas and Marty Surdyk for a day of railfanning in Lake County. Sometimes Jeff Troutman would join us.
We would spend much of the day on the CSX Erie West Subdivision and the Lake Erie District of Norfolk Southern in and near Perry.
This being Northeast Ohio, we always expected winter weather. By that I mean snow. But not every year saw bountiful snow on the ground despite Lake County being in a region of Ohio known for heavy snow.
During a few of those outings, the day was dark and dreary with little evidence of the beauty of winter.
That was not the case, though, during our outing of Feb. 2, 2014.
Overnight it had rained and then snow fell as the temperatures dropped.
The wet conditions meant that snow clung to just about everything in sight and pretty much stayed that way all day.
The result was one of the best winter railfanning outings I’ve ever had.
Several image from that day I’ve posted on this site before and Marty has shown during Akron Railroad Club programs some of the slides he made that day.
Ed won a monthly “best photograph” contest at Dodd Camera and received a free framed enlargement of that image that he has hanging on a wall of the dining room of his house.
That winning image was made late in the afternoon of westbound NS manifest freight 145 crossing the trestle over the Grand River in Painesville.
Last week I was rummaging through some of my digital file folders from early 2014 when I came across the images I made on Feb. 2.
Much to my surprise, I’ve only posted a few of those images on my Flickr page.
So I spent a couple days selecting and processing in Photoshop some images that had never been processed.
Shown above is a three-image sequence of the 145 crossing the now replaced Grand River trestle.
We were standing just beyond the west end of the bridge with all of us taking slightly different angles. What I liked about this series is how each image offers a different perspective.
The sequence begins with the train approaching the trestle from the east end, which captures that sense of anticipation that something memorable is about to happen.
It continues with an image of the train about halfway across the trestle and offers that compressed view common with images made with a telephoto lens.
The final image is what many would consider the money shot. Ed won the photo contest with an image similar to this one.
The train has reached the west edge of the bridge but is not yet off of it. The image combines the elements of a close train with a wide scenic view in a sort of convergence.
When I originally processed that image nearly eight years ago I converted it to black and white. There wasn’t much color in the scene and the conditions just seemed to say “black and white world.”
But after working with the image in color I decided it looks good in that form, too.
This day was one of the very few times I ever photographed NS operations on the Painesville trestle at the west end. I have numerous images from the east end, but rarely sought to do the west end.
The trestle had been built decades earlier by the Nickel Plate Road and was one of those structures that was always there even though ownership of the railroad changed to Norfolk & Western and then to Norfolk Southern.
It was always there even after the steam locomotives were retired, after the passenger trains were discontinued and after one generation of diesel locomotives had made way for another.
Generations of railroaders hired out and later retired after having crossed this bridge countless times during their long careers.
And then, so it seemed, one day the trestle was gone, replaced by a bridge that seems nondescript by comparison.
When viewed in this context, I’m even more pleased that we took the time in 2014 to get the photographs that we did of the 145 crossing the trestle.
Interestingly, that day was the only time I ever photographed an NS train crossing the trestle from ground level. But that is a story for another day.
Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders
Here are some other trains we got on Sunday in the snow while railfanning along the former Pennsylvania Railroad’s Fort Wayne Line.
In the top image is CSX train I132 at Dunkirk. This is a run-through train that CSX gets from Union Pacific. It terminates on CSX in Detroit and usually operates with UP motive power.
The next two photographs were made at North Robinson. This was the second of three 171s running on this day.
Due to crew shortages three of these trains had been tied down at various locations on the Ft Wayne line one for almost a week. On Sunday they found crews to run them.
The last image is the 55K at Mansfield. This was an extra grain train for the big elevator in town.
Photographs by Todd Dillon
Penn Central Alco C628 No. 6301 is in Canton on a cold day somewhere between 1968 and 1972. This motive power consist also has an EMD SD45 and another C628. The 6301 was built for the Pennsylvania Railroad in March 1965 as the 6301. It also carried that roster number during its brief time working for Conrail where it never patched with CR markings.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
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