A bit of a status report, if you will on the former B&O line from Cincinnati to St. Louis…
I spent the last week in Southern Indiana and Illinois (side trip to Kentucky Lake for crappie fishing) and took a look, listened in, and chatted with CSX employees about the St. Louis line.
First, the line between Seymour and Mitchell is used only for locals. It is a pretty interesting segment with Big Tunnel near Tunnelton, In. The line skirts the White River valley and is similar to West Virginia lines. Last Monday while in this area a CSX supervisor indicated the line was receiving new (used) CWR and considerable work to upgrade it. He indicated the line will see re-routed trains from Cincy to St. Louis rather than the current operations via Louisville/Evansville or Indy. The operations change is due to increased congestion on those lines. The crews were out and working. Generators were being installed in Big Tunnel to accomodate the work. The often repeated rumor of coal traffic over this line was repeated by the supervisor.
The Southern Illinois segment sees regularly scheduled autoracks and manifest freights plus coal trains and occasional grain trains. The same supervisor indicated 8-15 trains daily. I heard or saw an average of 5 per day (roughly half the day)…which worked out to 10/day.
The track in Southern Illinois has seen some upgrades and is in pretty decent shape. A westbound whipped thru Olney at about 50mph and for a moment I was back in the 70’s with Cotton Belt units leading a mile of boxcars at a mile a minute.
Train lengths (car counts) were impressive with the manifests anywhere from 70 to 105 cars and the auto racks from 60-80. There were no 30 car trains. No doublestacks were observed.
The old B&O color position light signals were in place. A signal maintainer indicated they were close to 70 years old and worked pretty well. What a nice change of pac