CSX 1st Quarter Report

There has been a lot of folks waiting to see CSX's 1st quarter earning report. Some are using this a gauge of how the economy is expected to do this year. Usually railroads will see traffic rise or fall 4-6 months before it hits Wall Street reports.

Below is a link to the report.

There is a great table on page 9 showing the revenue by product, profit by product and the profit by unit. If you ever wondered how much a RR might earn for products carried, here you go.

CSXT 2009 1st Quarter report

Pullman Porters

When time permits, I try to read the local newspaper online and the NYTimes. The NYTimes recently ran an article about Amtrak honoring Pullman porters on National Train Day. Reading this article took me back many years to a conversation I had with my godfather, Richard Gunn.

One day while waking Smokey, his little black dog, we heard a train horn from the train tracks near his Mt. Overlook Street home in Cleveland.

“Can we walk down to the tracks to see the train?”

“By the time we walk down to the tracks, the train will have left town” said Richard.

“One day I want to work on a railroad as an engineer. Did you know anyone who worked on the railroad?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“My father. He was a Pullman porter mostly on the C&O trains.”

“Really? Did you get to travel on trains using a pass?”

“Yes, but all railroads did not honor the passes completely or at all. Some railroads did not honor the passes because they had their own porters, not Pullman porters though.”

“Did you ever get to ride on the 20^th Century Limited?’

There was a chuckle from Richard before he proceeded to answer my question.

“ The 20^th Century did not stop in Cleveland. It used the New York Central track near the lake that bypassed the Terminal Tower. It would have been a schedule killer to route the train into the Terminal. Plus the Terminal did not want steam engines smoking up the building, so you would have to put on some electrics or diesels on it and then take them off at Collinwood. I don’t think the New York Central would have liked some family of a Pullman porter riding their flagship.”

After that was said, there was nothing more for me to ask and nothing more for him to say. We continued are walk around the block, stopping at the Preisler Home Lumber Center on Woodland Ave. to say hi to the staff and get me some gum from the Ford $.10 gum machine.

I'm currently doing research on my God father's father. Hopefully I can find some information out and add him to the Pullman Porter Registry.

Hand Signal Day on the Railroad

Here is a link to the railroad hand signals that most brakeman/conductors used in the past and still today.

I am #1

Sometime in January 2002, I was at Collinwood Yard taking pictures. I was lucky enough to catch CSX AC44 unit #1 coming into the yard. I was able to pull off the photo below with some luck. This pan shot was taken with an old Canon Powershot 2mp model. If you know anything about the old Canon digitals, you know how hard it was to get a picture of something if it was moving. You would press the button and hope that it would take a picture in the same life time. Lucky for me that this train was moving slow, a steady hand and a lucky aim.

You can click on this picture for a bigger view. This also applies to most pictures posted.

Shortline Tour, Part 1

I work for a short line railroad that runs from Glenn Willow, Ohio to Cleveland, Ohio. Our little line hauls scrap metal from a huge junk yard in Cleveland destined for steel mills near the Ohio~Pennsylvania boarder area. Once and awhile, we receive a coiled wire type of steel that is used to make rebar. This steel arrives in very nice cars from the CN railroad for a customer along our line. We interchange with the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway (WE) at Falls Junction Yard. The WE brings us empty gondolas and sometimes coiled steel for delivery. In return, we bring them loads of scrap metal. We have a very basic and simple operation that only requires us usually to run once a day during the week. If we have more than 19-20 loads, we will usually make 2 trips to avoid stalling on our little hill.

I've decided to start posting about and sharing photos of our line to give folks a better idea of my stories. This is picture was taken in the same area of my famous bunny story.


Here is a picture taken from the Havard Road bridge near East 103 Street. Currently the crew is sorting out cars using the passing track and house track in the 93rd Street Yard..