It is morning in Cassandra, Pennsylvania, as Amtrak’s eastbound Pennsylvanian rushes through on the Pittsburgh Line of host railroad Norfolk Southern.
The sunlight is nicely illuminating the fall foliage on the surrounding hillsides but has yet to fine the rails. This image was made on Oct. 17, 2007.
There was plenty of color in Cumberland, Maryland, on Oct. 23 when Amtrak’s Capitol Limited arrived en route to Washington.
No. 30 arrived on time with Phase I heritage locomotive No. 161 on the point. Behind it is colorful fall foliage on a nearby hillside.
The tracks here are owned by CSX but were once part of the Baltimore & Ohio mainline that hosted the original Capitol Limited between Chicago and Washington.
Photograph by Edward Ribinskas
Amtrak’s Chicago-bound Capitol Limited is only a couple of minutes or so behind schedule as it rushes through Chesterton, Indiana, on the Chicago Line of Norfolk Southern.
The P42DC is crossing the bridge over Coffee Creek and passing a stand of fall foliage.
No. 29 on this day had six cars rather than the customary five with the additional car being a transition sleeper. The train was reported on the Amtrak website to have arrived at Chicago Union Station on time at 8:45 a.m.
A pair of Amtrak P42DC locomotives are nose to nose in the motive power consist of the westbound Lake Shore Limited in Cleveland on Nov. 15, 1997. Both units were trailing in the three-locomotive consist. They’ve picked up some ice during their journey through upstate New York and along the Lake Erie shoreline between Buffalo and Cleveland.
Amtrak’s northbound Saluki had a surprise as it ripped through Arcola, Illinois, on Sunday, Feb. 20. A P42DC was on the point of the Chicago-bound train rather than the usual SC-44 Charger. I don’t know the reason for the motive power substitution. Perhaps the assigned Charger had mechanical difficulties and was swapped out the day before when the equipment went south as the Illini. Note that pulling the train is No. 58, which is the road number for the northbound City of New Orleans, which also uses these same former Illinois Central rails. The train is shown passing the former Illinois Central passenger station in Arcola.
P42DC No. 71 will serve as a trailing unit for a Hiawatha Service train that will be departing from Milwaukee in about another hour. The image was made on March 18, 2004, and was scanned from a slide. The view is at the west end of the train shed.
Amtrak P42DC No. 128 catches some spring morning sunlight as it pushes Hiawatha Service Train 332 out of Sturtevant, Wisconsin, on May 20, 2006. Chicago-Milwaukee trains over the years have typically operated in push-pull service with a control cab on the south end and a locomotive on the north end. The train is on Canadian Pacific track once owned by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific. The train’s consist is pure Horizon fleet.
In conjunction with Operation Lifesaver, Amtrak has repainted P42DC No. 203 with a special livery to honor the 50th anniversary of OLS.
The locomotive features a black and yellow scheme that replicates a railroad crossing warning sign and bears the OLS slogan, “See Tracks? Think Train.”
The tribute unit was shown off this week during a ceremony in Washington. It was repainted by the Amtrak Beech Grove shops near Indianapolis.
No. 203 returned to revenue service following the ceremony at Washington Union Station.
OLS was founded in 1972 as a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting railroad safety and conducts national campaigns seeking to reduce railroad-related collisions, deaths, and injuries.
It has programs in 46 states and uses trained volunteers to provide safety presentations to law enforcement, first responders, school-aged children, school bus operators, truck drivers and student drivers among others.
No. 203 was assembled by General Electric in October 2001 and is expected to pull trains throughout Amtrak’s national network.
To appreciate this image it probably helps if you grew up in a place with a lot of flat farmland.
Shown is Amtrak’s City of New Orleans racing northbound toward Chicago near Leverett, Illinois, shortly after sunrise on a Sunday morning.
No. 58 was more than an hour behind schedule leaving Champaign. The train is on the Chicago Subdivision of Canadian National, which at one time was the mainline of the Illinois Central between Chicago and New Orleans.
As for what I, an east central Illinois native, see in this photograph, I see familiarity. There are no striking physical features such as mountains and valleys, just farmland and in the distance traces of urbanization in Champaign-Urbana. Above the Superliner cars you also can see the top of the grain elevator at Leverett.
This is all familiar to me and in a way comforting.
I would not have been able to get this image had No. 58 been on time as it would have been dark as it passed through here. It was a nice way to get a day of railfanning off to a good start.
If you look closely, you will see there is frost on the crossties of the CN track. Temperatures were in the 20 when I made this photograph on a winter morning.
I later checked and determined No. 58 halted at Chicago Union Station 58 minutes late.
It was one of those quintessential November days in Cleveland with gray skies overhead.
But if you were a rail passenger advocate then, metaphorically speaking, the skies could not have been any bluer.
After years of pushing for it, advocates were getting their wish. Amtrak was extending its New York-Pittsburgh Pennsylvanian west of the Steel City.
Finally, Northeast Ohio would see an Amtrak train in daylight hours in circumstances other than an existing scheduled train running several hours late.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s Amtrak would put on show to celebrate the inauguration of new service. On Nov. 7, 1998, it was Cleveland’s turn for that with the Pennsylvanian coming to town.
It was not, though, the first time in the 1990s that an Amtrak publicity train had come to Northeast Ohio.
In fall 1990 Amtrak ran a publicity special through Akron and Cleveland in advance of the rerouting of the Broadway Limited via Akron and the Capitol Limited via Cleveland.
Those publicity trains were greeted by marching bands, speakers and a festive welcoming ceremony.
By contrast, when the Pennsylvanian came to Cleveland the celebration was more subdued.
There was a speaker inside the station and a specially decorated cake. But there were no marching bands and Amtrak did not assign the publicity train an open platform car or a dome car as it had in 1990.
There was a respectable crowd to greet the first No. 44, which arrived on a Saturday from Chicago.
My photographs from that day show people clustered around the vestibules of the Horizon coaches and I’m not sure if they were allowed onboard to tour the train or if some of them were boarding as ticketed passengers.
I struck up a brief conversation with Amtrak conductor George Sanders, noting we shared a last name in common but were otherwise unrelated.
He posed for a photograph and I got his address and later sent him a copy.
The train rolled into the station with two P42DC locomotives, two material handling cars, a Superliner Sightseer lounge, a Superliner transition sleeper, two Horizon fleet coaches, an Amfleet coach, an Amfleet café car and a string of RoadRailers on the rear.
The RoadRailers were a sign of why Amtrak had extended the Pennsylvanian to Chicago.
The Three Rivers, which had replaced the Broadway Limited in 1995 between New York and Pittsburgh and been extended to Chicago in November 1996, had reached its limit of 30 cars, most of which carried mail and express.
To expand its burgeoning head-end business, Amtrak needed another train to Chicago. That would be the Pennsylvanian.
Amtrak had wanted to extend the Pennsylvanian westward before Christmas 1997 but lacked sufficient crews.
Although new operating personnel were hired in spring 1998, Conrail refused to allow the expansion during the summer track work season.
Because the postal service usually dispatched mail around dawn, No. 44 was scheduled to depart Chicago at 6 a.m. while No. 43 left Philadelphia at 6:30 a.m.
The Pennsylvanian reached Cleveland eastbound in early afternoon and westbound in late afternoon.
It was scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 11:59 p.m. and in Philadelphia at 12:25 a.m. That meant no convenient same-day connections in Chicago and few in Philly.
But passenger traffic was less the objective of the Pennsylvanian extension than head-end revenue.
Then Amtrak president George Warrington said at the time that this would put Amtrak on a glide path to profitability.
Those who understood the realities of passenger train scheduling would have understood that this made the Pennsylvanian’s future in Cleveland rather tenuous.
Nonetheless, there was optimism in the air as Nos. 43 and 44 began serving Cleveland, Elyria and Alliance.
I don’t remember anything the speaker said during the welcome ceremony or even who he was. I was there primarily to make photographs of Amtrak in Cleveland in daylight.
Except during holiday travel periods, ridership of the Pennsylvanian would prove to be light. On many days it had only about a dozen passengers aboard in Ohio and Indiana.
Ridership was stunted by chronic delays that occurred in 1999 following the breakup of Conrail by Norfolk Southern and CSX.
The typical consist for the Pennsylvanian was three coaches and a food service car.
A schedule change on April 29, 2002, moved the Chicago departure back six hours to 11:55 p.m., which made No. 44 the “clean up” train to accommodate those who had missed connections in Chicago from inbound western long distance trains to the eastern long-distance trains.
At the same time, the westbound Pennsylvanian began departing Philadelphia two hours later in order to provide additional connections.
No. 43 now was scheduled to reach Chicago Union Station at 1:44 a.m.
A change of administrations at Amtrak led to the carrier announcing in fall 2002 that it would cease carrying mail and express. As a result the Pennsylvanian would revert to New York-Pittsburgh operation.
On Feb. 8, 2003, I went down to the Cleveland Amtrak station with my camera to make photographs of the Pennsylvanian, the first time I’d done that since the November 1998 inaugural train had arrived.
This time, though, I boarded as a paying passenger, getting off in Pittsburgh and returning on the last westbound No. 43 to run west of Pittsburgh.
There were no crowds, cake or speakers to greet the Pennsylvanian in the Cleveland station on this day.
And that sense of optimism that had hung in the air more than four years earlier had long since dissipated.
Rail passenger advocates in Ohio are still trying to get back that sense of optimism.
Amtrak in the Heartland 