Looking east toward oblivion.
On June 14, 2010, I spent the day tracing the route of the old Erie Railroad between Marion, Ohio and the Ohio-Indiana state line. At Marion, the former Erie line is still active, albeit integrated with other routes. West of Marion, it’s largely abandoned. In some places the former double-track mainline is easy to follow, in others it has been ploughed under with virtually no evidence left to hint that it was ever there.
At Kenton, Ohio, I found this vestige of Erie double track, where the line crossed County Road 140, east of Main Street. I’m looking east, toward Marion. I can only imagine The Lake Cities (Jersey City-Chicago) racing west across this crossing, or one of Erie’s magnificent S-class Berkshires hitting the crossing with tonnage.
I was happy to find track in place to give me some sense of what the railroad was about. Who knows what I’ll find if I return in ten years time.
Exposed with my Lumix LX-3 digital camera.
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Rog Puta and I rode the E.L. from Hoboken to Chicago during the Christmas holiday in 1969. He was headed home from Washington, D.C. for the holidays and I was tagging along for a brief pre-Christmas visit. The “Lake Cities” was the obvious choice, given that it was “on the block.” The train had a sleeper as far as Youngstown (they dropped it there at 0700 so it could go back to Hoboken on that evening’s eastbound, thus allowing them to cover both trains with a single car), but we rode coach. The diner stayed on until Huntingdon, Indiana, so we could have dinner as we left New Jersey, and breakfast and lunch as we crossed Ohio. Again, that car turned so the eastbound folks could have dinner and breakfast. On the last leg into Chicago the train consisted of a couple of E-units and three streamlined coaches, and man did they FLY across Indiana. We stood in the rear vestibule and enjoyed the ride despite the grey, cold day. Headend traffic was long gone, and sadly, the train itself was discontinued in January, 1970.