Made it down to Thurmond, West Virginia this past Wednesday and thought I’d share the videos I made of the trip.
This first video is of the part of the trip down crossing into West Virginia from Ohio and then from turning off West Virginia Route 34 onto Interstates 64 and then 77, going through the tolls, and stopping at the rest area for lunch.
The second video of the trip is from the rest area into Thurmond. At one point on Thurmond Road, there was a delay due to an RJ Corman crew replacing the retaining wall between the branch and the road. After crossing the RJ Corman tracks a second time, I caught an empty coal train with CSX power heading back to the mine. Unfortunately, I only caught the tail end of the train as I came up to the crossing before Thurmond.
I was a bit confused at the folks at Thurmond as I was trying to pull into the parking lot at the station. They had West Virginia plates on their truck and were stopping me (Ohio plates on my Jeep) for directions. Then the two ladies just stood in front of my Jeep as I was trying to pull in and get off the road.
While at Thurmond, I did manage to catch five trains coming through town, which I thought was a good number for the light amount of traffic that I’ve heard comes through there.
The guy in the tan shirt during the first train was quite annoying. He came up while the train was going through and asked if I was shooting a video. When I nodded that I was (implying that I didn’t want my voice on the video), he just kept talking.
I’d planned on catching Amtrak’s westbound Cardinal when it came through at 6:51PM, but it was well after 7PM before the signals lit up for a westbound. By 8PM, a heavy thunderstorm and patchy dense fog began to roll in. I gave up on the Cardinal about 8:20 and got starte