Eastern Railroad Discussion > January 1st 2021, NS 218 in Circleville, NS 858 in Chillicothe

I started the New Year at mom and dad's house in Dayton this Morning. I got my first train and bus pictures in Dayton then went to Springfield and Columbus. From Columbus I went to Circleville OH and heard the Kenova Dispatcher talking to NS 18M and NS 218. I got some Taco John's and had a short wait before 218 came around the curve at Scioto Street in Circleville Ohio. 
1) NS 218. Behind and to the left of the train is the US 23 By-Pass around Circleville and on the other side of it is the C & O (now CSX) Northern Sub. 
2) NS 218 crossing High Street, which was originally US 23. This is approximately where the Pennsylvania, later Penn Central Trinway-Morrow Secondary crossed the N & W. Circleville had a tower and the tower operator issued the blocks for the PRR branchline. To make it more interesting at one time the Scioto Valley traction would have crossed over all of this on some kind of trestle. Definetly would like to have seen all of this years ago.
3) I tried simply hand-held with the D5000 tonight. NS 858 is crossing the former CH&D at Rennick then comes by us passes under the signal cantilever for Chillicothe and goes under Main St where the B & O would have crossed until 1989 or so.

Jim 

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Neat, thanks for the explanation.
Dan

Posted from iPhone

Circleville, OH, Pumpkin Capital of the world!
In the Eighties the two rail lines were a virtual conveyor belt of coal trains. Was through Circleville when the rickety PRR branch was still there. N&W did creep through the curves in Circleville but otherwise Chessie and N&W really flew through the countryside. Further down Rte 23 in Chillicothe we were having breakfast at a Jimmy Deans when a southbound GT freight rolled through town not 25 feet away. I believe that rail line was lifted since then? Good memories from long ago and far away. Amtrak was still running through Athens OH and the Moonville Tunnel the first few times I was there. I was really surprised to return a year or two later and that heavy mainline was just plain gone!
Go

If you look closely in picture two you can see the pumpkin!
Hey Gonut, are you thinking of Bob Evans on Bridge Street in Chillicothe Ohio? If so I ate there when I was a kid and we always asked for a booth looking at the B & O mainline. Saw plenty of good stuff while eating Biscuits and Gravy there. We were through Circleville a few times but only once when the PRR was still there. My mom dad sister and I went to see if my Grandma in Greenfield wanted to go to the Pumpkin Festival in Circleville. She didn't so we came up and went across US 22 which ran alongside the PRR much of the way. Even though I was really little I could tell that there was something really wrong with that track. 
Later on I took hours of video in and around Chillicothe in the early 1990's but after the B & O mainline was gone. For years I even thought I had done too much as the locomotives stayed the same, the signals stayed the same, the codeline stayed the same and the coal trains ran continuously as always. Of course in the last ten years or so all the signals were replaced and pole lines removed. Standard cab locomotives no longer exist through here and if you hear a coal train on the scanner it is now the train worth waiting for.

Jim



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/21 18:16 by tq-07fan.

Nice pictures of an interesting places.  I was actually working there with the N&W MofW forces (at that point while techinically part of NS Corporation is was definitely still an N&W controlled operation) when the Circleville diamonds came out in November 1986.  Remember two things about that project: 1) the smell of the decaying soybeans we dug up as part of track rework we had to do to connect the 'old main' to the adjacent Purina plant on the former PRR Trinwayy branch, and 2) the great lunchs and hot coffee I had in diner that was a former Interurban car directly adjacent the former diamond location.    

Jim,

Nice pics!

You meant Court Street in Circleville where the PRR crossed, right? High Street is in the north end of town.

There's one abutment from the Scioto Valley Traction bridge still standing right behind the Dairy Queen on Court Street just north of the RR crossing. The Scioto Valley only crossed over the PRR (there's a neat picture at the Pickaway County Historical Society of an SV interurban car crossing the bridge over the PRR), and came back down on the north side of the N&W main; it then ran along the east side of the N&W all the way to Kinnikinick several miles north of Chillicothe, where it veered to the east a bit then swung under the N&W and headed southwest toward Chillicothe, parallelling State Route 180 and State Route 159 (and roughly paralleling the N&W).

The SV right-of-way and many artifacts such as bridge abutments at roads are still plainly evident between Circleville and Chillicothe, including the Kingston power house and the bridge where the C&O crossed over the SV. On the north side of Chillicothe (back behind the shopping mall) is a nice three-tiered embankment with the SV right-of-way at the bottom, the N&W in the middle, and the C&O at the top; unfortunately it's pretty overgrown but would have made a jim-dandy photo back in the day. The RoW ran between the C&O and N&W north of Circleville and that RoW is still there as are the depots at Ashville and Canal Winchester; and the Groveport Pike bridge over the C&O (ex-Hocking Valley) was originally the SVT bridge; old Groveport Pike runs beside the embankment and crossed the C&O at grade.

Tom WA8PYR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/21 15:45 by wa8pyr.