Info needed about the Nickel Plate Road - please...

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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Some more info-I have the old video “Wheeling in the Rat Hole”-a great vid on the NKP 765 during the 1982 excursion season on the old WLE between Bellevue & Brewster, & it’s “subbing” on the Southern “Rat Hole” division later in the year-a good “Berk” vid IMO, but I don’t know if it’s still available anywhere.

An aside about the video I have, & still a strange unanswered question that nobody can answer. I received this video (from what distributor I can’t recall-I think Walther’s) somewhere around 1984 give or take a year. & that’s the strange part-received. I never ordered it! & to top it off, I didn’t have a VCR at the time! (would be another 2 years till I did) & also, it wasn’t like tapes like these were cheap then (it was well over $50 value in the Walther’s catalog at the time I think) & to top it off, it featured spots that I knew of & hit now & then (even as a kid-like the shot of it crossing Sugar Creek south of Dalton where my Dad took me fishing for years-& later on would catch the 611 with a Kodak pocket cam in 1989) Asked around friends, relatives that knew I liked trains-everyone was clueless. Either way, I still dig it out now & then, because I LOVE THAT BERK! Just very “Twilight Zonish” as to how I got it!

22

  1. Did NS put in the “Cloggville connection” in Cleveland they were talking about a few years ago? I guess this was supposed to reduce and perhaps even eliminate traffic on the ex NKP main out through Lakewood and Rocky River and that neck of the woods. YES

  2. Given that NS now owns the ex-NYC route from Berea, OH to Chicago and in effect has paralell mains across northern Ohio and Indiana, how much traffic does the ex-NKP main have today? It has gone up.

[:D]

23

While I can speak for only a short segment of NKP track, I will tell you this:

I work for a company that sits right on the ex-NKP Ft Wayne - Chicago line, just on the west edge of Ft Wayne. We have at least 1 train an hour go by, sometimes more like 1 per 30 minutes. (I don’t know which direction; there are no windows).

I live within a block of ex-NKP Ft Wayne - Cincinnati line, near the south edge of Ft Wayne. (Actually, under NKP it stopped two dozen miles short of Cincy and was a light-traffic branch.) We have traffic going by on an hourly basis. I am within earshot of the St Louis - Ft Wayne line. No estimate on traffic density because if they don’t blow and blow their whistle I don’t know they are going by.

Current traffic patterns going by me: Cincinnati - Chicago, Chicago - Cleveland, Cincinnati - Cleveland, St Louis - Cleveland. Most of these lines meet just to the east of town in a division-point yard. There is a direct connection for Chicago-Cincinnati traffic to avoid the yard.

If anybody lives along the Water Level Route in NE Indiana: how much traffic do you see going by?