Railroad landmarks, then and now

[Patrick_Flory]

There are so many places in the folklore of railroading. Some are well-known, others forgotten, but all well worth remembrance..

I’ll start with the one not very well known within Railroading itself, but world famous as the nameplace of the Big Bang of the blues music - where the Southern cross the dog.

Where The Southern Cross The Dog – Moorhead, Mississippi

Here is a world famous painting of where the Southern cross the dog I believe from the early 1960s.

Here it is today. The dog is gone. About the only thing still remaining is the water tower off on the right.

[Woke_Hoagland]

Remember the Snuff Dipper and the Yellow Dog Blues? Sometimes ‘high tech’ is not very sophisticated when you go to try to use it…

[Patrick_Flory]

I have heard about the Texas and Pacific and ignite fuel, but not in detail.

That yellow dog, however, is an entirely different dog than the one I was talking about.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a couple more places that would need to be mentioned right away…… the location of the Casey Jones wreck in Vaughan, Mississippi and the site of the wreck of the old 97…. Both incidents have famous songs about them as well.

[gmpullman]

Griffith, Indiana:

Erie Lackawanna SDP-45 before Nov 1975 and after April 1982 by Mark LLanuza, on Flickr

Cheers, Ed

[Woke_Hoagland]

I have been to Vaughan. The actual site of the collision was completely overgrown, and not on the current line of railroad (which I believe is now open again and run by a short-line operation). If you did not know the detail history, you would never realize that sleepy spot was once a place of horror.

I lived out east for a while, and had one of my business post-office boxes in Eads, Tennessee. To get to the post office and then home, I had to cross a wide swale that used to be the ROW of the NC&StL mainline. Right there, a passenger train hit a school bus in the early '50s – you would never have known, but once you do it’s hard to forget.

[Patrick_Flory]

I’ll post pictures of Vaughan Mississippi tomorrow, but I rode it through it in 1965 on a train trip on the old IC mainline. One of the stories at the time is that one of the wrecked boxcars spilled corn all over the place, and that wild corn still grew along the track. It was still there back then.

[Patrick_Flory]

Is that a landmark location? There’s not much change after seven years….. other than the main line is being pulled up

[Patrick_Flory]

Is this the location?

[Hojack55]

I spend hours on end tracing old railroad beds on google maps. Railroads that have disappeared into legend.

[gmpullman]

@Patrick_Flory

Is that a landmark location? There’s not much change after seven years….. other than the main line is being pulled up

Depends on how you define ‘landmark’. Are you looking for Grand Central Terminal or ‘The Mole’ in 'Frisco? I simply provided a 'before & after image which is what I thought you were going after.

Erie E-units at Akron Ind before & after 1976 & 2017 by Mark LLanuza, on Flickr

@Patrick_Flory

Is this the location?

Yes. Griffith is probably what Trains Magazine would consider a ‘Hot Spot’.

IC 3 by Carlos Ferran, on Flickr

Read more:

Griffith, IN: 1924-1999 CN/EJ&E vs. CN/GTW Junction Tower vs....

Regards, Ed

[richhotrain]

Hey, Ed, that crossing at Griffith is a railroad landmark. No two ways about it.

Rich

[Patrick_Flory]

When I started this discussion, I was actually thinking about some railroad location where some famous event had happened, like where the Southern cross the dog and where Casey Jones bought the farm. But yes, some exceptional railroading landmarks within railroading ought to be part of this too. One thing I can think about that someone ought to bring up is the 3 level crossing in Richmond, Virginia, to see if is different today than it was back in the glory days of railroading. And horseshoe curve, which, as I understand is considerably diminished today than it was in the past. Another might be the Saluda grade.

All of these represent a decline, but a positive example might be the railfan grandstand in Folkston Georgia, and what it was like before all the foamers started going there.

[Patrick_Flory]

Man that is some serious track work there, 12 diamonds within a couple hundred feet of each other. I’m trying to get through that very long blog about this location and it’s making my head spin. I grew up around country branchlines, and this stuff is just way above me.

[Backshop]

Horseshoe Curve isn’t really “diminished” all that much. It’s down to “only” three tracks and the trains are fewer but longer, but it’s still a very, very busy place. A place that has almost disappeared, is the old West End of the B&O west of Cumberland on the St Louis mainline–Cheat River, Cranberry and 17-Mile Grades.

[Patrick_Flory]

Any before and after B&O photos?

I am unfamiliar with the B&O. But I’ve heard of sand patch grade. Is it in that west end section?

[Backshop]

No, Sand Patch is on the line from Cumberland to Pittsburgh and is still quite busy, but not at the same level as Horseshow. The old B&O St Louis line was cut in pieces and lost through traffic. The only thing left was coal. With the downturn in coal mining, there isn’t much left.

[NKP_guy]

Woke_Hoagland’s first-hand account of the Casey Jones crash site at Vaughan, Mississippi is interesting. I passed by there once on the City of New Orleans, but I knew it wasn’t the exact spot. I can’t possibly expect to go there myself, or even know exactly where the site is, so Woke saved me a lot of trouble. I’ve been fascinated by Casey Jones’s story since I read about in that wonderful book, A Treasury of American Folklore, published about 1945. The actual account of John Henry’s steam drill contest is there, too. Both of these are eyewitness, first-hand accounts, on which everything since is based.

I’d like to submit here as a much sadder event: the Ashtabula bridge disaster of 1876. YouTube has many videos on the subject, but the one I’ll post here is what you would see if you went to the site today, just as Woke did at Vaughan.

First, a general depiction:

Then the aftermath:

Now the video of the site today:

(https://youtu.be/j0j1DsgyfO4?si=ULOuqlrztRh0gzd0)

Next, here’s a beautiful and evocative suite for piano of 10 short movements about this, “the greatest single passenger train wreck of the 19th century.” I commend it to you.

(The Ashtabula River Railroad Disaster | Gayle Skidmore)

Lastly, Amasa Stone of Cleveland, President of the LS & MS Ry, later cast as the prime culprit. Incidentally, I heard years ago from Cleveland people who knew the family, that his first name is pronounced AM-a-sa, not a-MASS-a.

He was one of the most important railroaders of the 19th century and a builder of the New York Central System, along with the Vanderbilts. He was also a notable and sincere philanthropist.

[Woke_Hoagland]

I have walked the site of the Ashtabula Horror, and it is hallowed ground.

I was there literally in the last week the ~1871 depot was in existence, and that was an additional link to the past. It is only a scant few hundred yards west of where the west bridge abutment was.

The New York Central thoroughly, completely erased any sort of ‘bridge’ there. It is now a high, wide, reassuringly solid stone fill, hundreds of feet wide at the bottom where the river now runs through a series of culverts; you have to walk considerably down the slope before you hear water running and get a sense of how high up the original bridge was. It is one of the great mute Never Agains in engineering.

I have tended to ‘blame’ Howe more than Stone for the bridge structure failing suddenly and catastrophically without warning. A Howe truss is not Mianus-River-pin-hanger catastrophic, but it’s certainly close enough.

As with the other famous ‘horror’ earlier and further east, some of the awfulness was in the rumor that the railroad company thought it would pay less for death than for maiming and injury, and refused to ‘do all possible’ to get people out of the burning cars in time. The carnage from shattering wooden cars is much like that reported for wooden ships – we are well to be out of that era, but we’re entering a counterpart with light HSR construction for any collision vector not carefully provided with CEM…

[Patrick_Flory]

I visited the Casey Jones wreck site at Vaughan Mississippi about 30 years ago, one beautiful clear summer day. It was the height of peacefulness. It was the kind of quiet that you hardly ever hear anymore, only the sound of birds and insects, with puffy white cumulus clouds drifting by. A few wild corn plants still grew along the track as I had heard.

When I feel like spending more time when I’m going to do a complete breakdown on Vaughan.

[BaltACD]

@Woke_Hoagland

The New York Central thoroughly, completely erased any sort of ‘bridge’ there. It is now a high, wide, reassuringly solid stone fill, hundreds of feet wide at the bottom where the river now runs through a series of culverts; you have to walk considerably down the slope before you hear water running and get a sense of how high up the original bridge was. It is one of the great mute Never Agains in engineering.

Which has the potential for the culverts to be overwhelmed and end up washing out the fill. In Hurricane Agnes of 1972 the Western Maryland had culverts for Gwynn’s Falls through their fill at Owings Mills, MD - the rains of Agnes washed out the culverts and the fill and also washed away a mother and daughter driving on US 140 (Reisterstown Road). A number of months later their car and bodies were found on the Southern reaches of the Chesapeake Bay.

I was working at Bayview Yard that night and had recently moved to Reisterstown, US140 was the only way I knew to drive home - fortunately my yardmaster that night also lived in the Reisterstown area and knew the back roads to try and get us home - some were blocked with flooding and others were blocked by trees or electric wires down - took us about three hours for what should have been a 30 or 40 minute trip.