Nostalgia & History > Around My Home Town

My memories as a child around Springfield include:

watching the DT&I go by as we waited at the crossing on the school bus.

Going to Dayton to see the AFT in 1976 or 1977.

Conrail Engines still in PC and Erie paint going by my house on the Mechanicsburg Sub.

Trucks being loaded onto Flat Cars at the International Harvister Plant.

Train Traffic on the Urbana Sub including a stack train in the 80\'s.

Double track main lines in Xiena and Urbana.

Guess what, they are all gone now!!

Anybody else have memories around there home town growing up?

I wish I had a camera!!!

My memories are similar in color to yours - I lived in Dundee, MI on M50; I could go out to the end of the driveway and see Ann Arbor GP35\'s cross the road to the west, and DT&I GPs go over the road on this bridge to the east of our house.

If the sun was low in the west you could see the shadow of the old ROW of the Chicago and Canada Southern in the farmer\'s field to the north across M50 when it was freshly plowed.

The Penn Central ran as many (if not more) trains over the AA/DT&I between Toledo and Detroit as the DT&I did, so you never knew what you\'d see come through next. I remember seeing an average of one train every half hour during the day between Diann and Flat Rock until the late 70\'s.

Monroe MI was good for lots of C&O trains that seemed to run like clockwork. I went to nursery school next to the main and would climb up the jungle gym and wave to the crew of the northbound freight that always went by when we were out for recess.

I loved it when we\'d go to the old Sears in downtown Monroe and see a PC SW roll past in the street heading to/from the flour mill. Part of the AFT was displayed right there by the park when it came to Detroit.

Aside from the CSX main, all of this is gone or very lightly traveled today.

Scott

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I was raised in Bethesda MD back in the days when the B&O had a freight office there. The office actually had an agent. The Georgetown Branch only ran one train a day in each direction, but back in the late 50\'s it could be 20 to 30 cars long.

The PRR branch to my home town of Crisfield, MD was my very first exposure to railroading. I remember being up in the cab of a Pennsy steam engine - probably a G5 4-6-0 or H class 2-8-0 - around 1950. The branch was dieselized in \'52 or thereabouts and abandoned in 1976. I remember some of the last loads of freight - onions in SLC ice reefers, shipped all the way from Arizona to make onion rings at a local plant. That gives you some idea how cheap rail shipping must have been in those days!

Bob

Speaking of Dundee,I just put this up this afternoon:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=18694

My slide was marked as "Dundee",so I hope it\'s got the correct info on it!I wish I\'d seen that bridge too-very nice!
(If interested,there is another DT&I shot with it from Flat Rock)
RAD

Speaking of Dundee,I just put this up this afternoon:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=18694

My slide was marked as "Dundee",so I hope it\'s got the correct info on it!I wish I\'d seen that bridge too-very nice!
(If interested,there is another DT&I shot with it from Flat Rock)
RAD

Nice shots, CRmac80!!

The picture of 407 is a couple miles south of Dundee - that\'s the US 23 overpass in the background. See the footing in the weeds from Henry Ford\'s proposed electrification of the DT&I? The DT&I/AA crossing and interchange yard at Diann is on the other side of the highway overpass.

Here\'s a shot of some more things that exist only in memories: cabooses and a tower operator at Diann.

Some more memories: the ex-NYC Adrian-Monroe branchline close to where you took the photo crossed US 23 at grade. It looked like a traffic accident when all the crossbucks started flashing as a train entered the crossing circuit. There weren\'t too many railroad lines that crossed interstate highways at grade (I\'d be nervous driving that train!).

Scott

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So the DT&I train is southbound approaching Riga. The US23 crossing for the old NYC was close to Ottawa Lake, correct? Doesn't NS still run into Ottawa Lake to switch the big grain facility you can see from the highway? It's been a while since I've been down that way, is there still a short line running on the old NYC line?