#conrail

Fifty Years Hence (7 of 8)

Being in Indianapolis for a conference last weekend, I made a series of down and dirty before and after work: the Big Four in Indianapolis, west of town to Avon Yard, and just a bit beyond.

This seventh pair in the series has us just one mile west of Avon Yard, at County Road 625 East and the so-called "Haunted Bridge" the story of which I know not. The vintage image here was made when Conrail was but one month old.

As stated in an earlier post, in 1976 we rail enthusiasts were excited as motive power from several eastern roads suddenly populated this Midwest engine servicing track and piloted trains on the mainline. Here we have a pair of Reading Company's GP35s running a train westward on the Big Four/NYC toward St. Louis.

I got an EB train in the newer image, but was not set up in time to catch the head end (not in the proper position anyway).

On one of my early tours of the former Boston & Albany west end, Bob Buck chased an eastward freight from Pittsfield up the grade toward Washington Summit, Massachusetts. Near Dalton, Bob, Doug Moore, John Conn, and I piled out of Bob’s Ford van and watched the train crawl up grade. I can still smell the creosote from the ties on that hot August afternoon. Doug Moore will undoubtedly remember…

September 5, 1997, Mineral Point, Pennsylvania. The day started out with a thick fog hugging the valley floor. Fog not withstanding, Conrail operated a parade of trains over its former Pennsylvania Railroad main line. Photographer Mike Gardner and I had driven down overnight from New England and were on-hand to capture the action. Midday, thunder to the west signaled the approach of a unit…

On April 1st 1976, the Consolidated Rail Corporation, better known as Conrail, was created by the United States Government in response of the financially crippling freight railroads in the Northeast, those of which were Penn Central, Erie Lackawanna, the Ann Arbor Railway, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Reading Company, the Centrail Railroad of New Jeresy, the Lehigh and Hudson River Railway, and the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines. While Amtrak handled much of the passenger services within the region, Conrail did operate their own commuter rail services that were inherited from their predecessors until the late 1970s to early 1980s when these commuter services were transferred over to various state/metropolitan transit authorities such as MBTA, SEPTA, NJT, and Metro-North. On June 1st 1999 however, Conrail had been split up by two other class I railroads in the northeast, CSX and Norfolk Southern. Since then, much of the trackage in the region has been in operation by the those two railroads in addition to smaller railroads such as class IIs, class IIIs, and tourist/heritage lines.

Though Conrail no longer exists as a Class I, it still exists as a terminal operating company owned by both CSX and NS. In addition, many locomotives that served Conrail, as well as its predecessors, are still in operation, or at least in existence either at museums or in storage. To commemorate Conrail's 50th Anniversary of it's formation, here is a line-up of some locomotives displaying their Conrail paint schemes.

The GG1 is a class of streamlined electric locomotives built for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) in the northeastern United States. The GG1 was developed as a replacement for the PRR P5 locomotives, which operated on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 1930s. Westinghouse Electric and General Electric were tasked with designing the locomotives to achieve a maximum speed of at least 100 mph (160 km/h), a streamlined body, and a centrally located driver's cab.