Grassroots Railroad Sports?

On the local Facebook group (Railroading Rambler, named after the Youtube channel that takes all the MA&N, NYS&W, and Adirondack videos), my tour of the old Herkimer, Newport & Poland Narrow Gauge Railway line was well-received. I now have people asking me to try and go north on the line from Poland up to Prospect Junction. Going to have to do my research and see if there is anything to see up that way, since that was abandoned three decades earlier. I know there was a big steel trestle at Trenton Falls, but that was yanked down during WWII for a scrap drive.

I can't recall the name of the guy, but my dad had all these old train movies, discussing old lines and such. I can no longer remember the exact specifics anymore, but this thread is a lot like those old VHS tapes and I am always learning something here.

DjGreggieP said:

I can't recall the name of the guy, but my dad had all these old train movies, discussing old lines and such. I can no longer remember the exact specifics anymore, but this thread is a lot like those old VHS tapes and I am always learning something here.

Was it Mike Bednar? Because I've stumbled across some of his stuff on Youtube, and his stuff, predominantly of northeastern operations since he was from Hokendauqua, PA and worked for the Lehigh Valley, is fascinating. He's also got that gravelly voice with the southeast PA accent that just seems to fit.

So, yesterday, I played hooky from work. It's been a slow week, my lift is broken, and my boss is on vacation. So I called in sick and went out to Utica to catch the NYS&W and MA&N in action. I was hoping that MA&N C425 #2453 was still being leased by the NYS&W, since when I passed through Utica on Sunday afternoon, the #2453 was still sitting in the NYS&W yard. So, I got set up on Schuyler Street and waited for NYS&W UT-1 to come through.

Well, to my disappointment, the #2453 had been returned to the MA&N on Monday, so GP40 #3040 was back on the job. Oh well, it was still a nice job and I don't believe I've gotten any NYS&W UT-1 photos with the new camera. Yes, those extended-height boxcars are as close to the traffic light as they look. Also, that's my faithful ol' Yaris hanging out on the left.

Driving down the road behind a train is a weird experience.

Off of Lomond Place in Utica, there's an old milepost marker. This is a rare section of active New York, Ontario & Western trackage and declares it to be 272 miles to New York City. In reality, the NYO&W's eastern terminus was actually at Weehawken, NJ, sharing the terminal there with the New York, West Shore & Buffalo, which became the New York Central's West Shore Line.

The #3040 passing by that milepost marker as it heads towards the New Hartford Industrial Track, which is an old NYO&W spur to service Oneida Warehousing. This is, I believe, the only regularly active section of O&W trackage. CSX owns the old mainline between Fulton and Oswego, but there has not been any moves over that line in a decade or two, and they've taken down the crossing gates and paved over some of the grade crossings.

Approaching the end of the NYO&W line. The line stub-ends, and then there's a switch to back down to Oneida Warehousing. 

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Making the shove back towards Oneida Warehousing. The road that runs parallel to this section of the New Hartford Industrial Track is called Ontario Road, and, yes, from what I've heard, the road got it's name from the New York, Ontario & Western.

Switching cars at Oneida Warehousing. They dumped the two boxcars in the siding, then back down inside the building to grab two cars from the business, then come out, hook onto the two cars they brought over and shove those inside.

Shoving back over Sauqouit (Suh-Coyt) Creek as they back down the NYO&W line towards where the junction is to go to Sangerfield.

Having crossed French Road, the #3040 continues it's shove move back towards the junction to the ex-DL&W line to Sangerfield.  

I did not follow them to Sangerfield, I instead went back to Utica Yard, hoping that Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern was running. It used to be that MA&N went west to Rome on Monday and Wednesday, north to Boonville on Tuesday and Thursday, and just did yard work on Friday. Well, from what I've read recently, they've moved more towards a "run as needed" but that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are still the most guaranteed days. Well, they weren't running yesterday, the engine house doors weren't even open and there were no locomotives outdoors. Instead, most work seemed to be MoW related, since they had a payloader running around the yard. I know they peeled up a part of the old RW&O on the west side of Rome (the line dead-ended and was used for car storage) and are relaying the rail in Utica to expand their Utica yard. Funny, Utica Yard used to be massive and Penn Central and Conrail stripped it down, and now MA&N is rebuilding it.

Out behind their shops in Utica, I did spot some stored stuff. One is a private passenger car, painted in the old modified NYC lightning stripe that the Adirondack Railroad used to use, but labeled for Adirondack & St. Lawrence Railway and lettered Nehasane. The A&StL was the corporate name for Seward Webb's line from Herkimer to Montreal, and Nehasane, Native American for "Beaver River" was the name of Webb's Camp on Lake Lila that was served by the line. The blue thing with yellow stripes is Lowville & Beaver River #1951, which was part of the MA&N's northern operations from Lowville to Croghan. The L&BR has several bridges that are embargoed and hasn't seen a train in over a decade, but MA&N moved the #1951 down to Utica in hopes of getting it running and using it as a switcher for Utica Yard. No reason to fire up a big Alco Century to switch cars for the day. The yellow thing to the right is M420TR #27, which is one of two MLW M420TRs ever built, which was an M420W running gear in an end-cab switcher body. The story I heard was that it was for sale and was said to be ready to run, so it was purchased with intent to operate it on the Adirondack Railroad. It showed up and was found to be a complete mess: junk turbo, severe freeze damage to the cooling system, some completely junk liners, not even remotely ready to run. So MA&N bought it and has been parting it out, keeping their M420W running with the good parts off of it.

An eastbound Amtrak Empire Service passing by the delapidated ex-New York Central yard office as it enters the east end of the yard. I find myself grabbing photos of the GE Genesises lately since I know they're living out their final days. EMD E7s were overlooked because they were commonplace and now there's only one, and some guys even ignored more exotic first-gen fare like PAs and Erie-Builts because they weren't steam locomotives . Then people ignored F40PHs and those are gone from Amtrak and in smaller numbers everywhere. Maybe someday someone will look back and be glad that I grabbed photos of P42s and P32AC-DMs.

A westbound P42 on the lead of the Lake Shore Limited. No clue what the "President Tom" engraved in the road grime means, but I got a pretty good idea what the "Bambi: 0 Train: 1" means. I'm also fascinated by why the cab door has that angled cut in the leading edge. Why not just make it rectangular?

I then saw that NYS&W #3040 had returned from Sangerfield and was shuffling cars around down at the west end of the yard. I'd never seen them use this track right in front of the building before, and indeed it hasn't seen any service since the NYS&W had some junker locomotives parked out there many, many years ago. The crews were having to scrape out the flangeways with prybars to get the years of mud, gravel and sand unpacked before they shoved this boxcar down there. I thought maybe they were just out of room or that CSX had bad-ordered the car on an eastbound train and needed to set it out someplace, but I learned that apparently Utica Coffee Roasting Company, who uses that building, has purchased the boxcar and intents to paint it up for advertisement purposes. 

As for that building, well, that's the old DL&W/Erie-Lackawanna freight house. I don't know exactly when this building was first closed, but it was sometime during the E-L era, when the railroad was consolidating division points and moved all dispatching for the Utica and Syracuse branches down to Binghamton. In 1980, Conrail handed over operation of the DL&W lines from Binghamton to Utica and Syracuse over to NYS&W, and NYS&W got the ex-E-L freight house to use as the Utica Branch offices. Doug Ellison said they went inside and everything was like everyone had set down their stuff and walked out and never come back. Calendars, coffee mugs, newspapers, company paperwork pencils, it was all just left where it laid. He said he even found a bunch of waybills for cars interchanged between the NYO&W and the DL&W, which he grabbed up for his own collection. In more recent years, the NYS&W sold the front part of the building to Utica Coffee Roasting Company to use as their offices and the back part of the building is used by a company. Kind of foolish; that building had room to store four locomotives plus an overhead crane and a pit. They sold that, and since then have had to build a single-stall enginehouse and dig a pit in the yard and now has had to build a building over the pit, while lacking facilities for any major work.

A nice roster shot of the #3040. She's ex-Atlanta & West Point and is the only remaining 4-axle power on the NYS&W roster. The New Hartford Industrial Track and the spur into F.X. Matt Brewing have some really sharp curves and 6-axle power cannot negotiate it, so they keep the #3040 for use on the Utica Branch. Why not an end-cab switcher or something smaller than a GP40? Well, the line to Sangerfield has Paris Hill, which was the longest, steepest grade on the entire DL&W, eight miles of 1.8% grade, so they need something with some serious power to get up the hill. In the spring, when the grain traffic to Sangerfield picks up, they often have to either move some bigger NYS&W power (like SD45 #3618) or lease something from CSX, although that will only be used to go to Sangerfield. When the #3040 comes up lame, which she has done quite a bit the past few years, they either have to borrow MA&N Alcos or lease a Geep from CSX. Someone said that back when the NYS&W had the big 4000hp, 4-axle GE B40-8s, they sent one up to Utica and had to use it to switch F.X. Matt, which had to be a sight. 

CSX freights passing by on the main line. Autoracks west, containers east. Getting rare to see CSX units still in the Yellow Nose 2 livery like the 530 there.

The #3040 kicking cars in the Utica Yard. 

After shoving cars around the yard, they hooked up two covered hoppers to the nose of the engine and headed west behind the freight house. At first I thought they were just heading around the one end of the track, but then they stayed out of sight for a while and I realized they were headed up to Schuyler Street again. And if they were shoving covered hopper cars, that could only mean one thing; they were going to service F.X. Matt Brewery. I've never, in my years of trying to photograph the Utica Branch, caught them switching cars at the brewery and it's quite a weird operation. So I hopped in my Yaris and raced back up there.

The locomotive has cut off from the two loaded cars, tying them down in the middle of the street with a brakeman protecting either end, then reversed back to throw the switch into the brewery so that they can go down in and retrieve the empty cars

It's a sharp curve and the flanges were squealing and the rails were creaking the whole way around.

In they go.

And then back out with two empty covered hopper cars.

The whole time this affair is going on, you have people angrily honking and yelling at the brakemen and trying to squeeze by. Utica is a rough city, and Schuyler Street is a particularly rough neighborhood. I think I'd be a nervous wreck trying to be an engineer or a brakeman on this job.

The brakeman bends the iron. The switch here is recessed below street level and has a little access hatch. When they show up, they unlock the hatch, reach down and throw the switch. That way you don't have a switch stand on the sidewalk, or a big hole in the ground. These switches are nicknamed "Submarine switches" and that's because when it rains, the pit fills up and the switch stand is underwater.

They then hooked up to the two loaded cars, pulled forward and shoved them down inside the building.

Passing by the old DL&W crossing guard shack on Schuyler Street as it swings off of the street-running. This was built in '52 and the tower was fitted up to drop the Oriskany Street gates and control the traffic lights down Schuyler Street as far down as Noyes Street, which gave an audible buzzer to indicate a train on the circuit. The cabin itself is much older having been built in 1908 as a drawbridge interlocking tower for the Erie Canal at the site of the current Oriskany Blvd grade crossing. After the Erie Canal was relocated, the tower was reused as a crossing gate control tower for the Oriskany Street Crossing. Shockingly, this tower was manned up until 1987 when the Susquehanna fully automated the  crossing protection on Schuyler Street. The Utica & Mohawk Valley NRHS chapter took ownership of it and restored it.

Heading back towards Utica Yard to wrap up the day. While there, I bumped into Mr. Railroading Rambler himself, who I had never met in person before. We had a nice chat, and he complimented me on my photos and contributions to the group, and again said he was particularly impressed with my trip from Poland to Herkimer. He also mentioned that, to the right of this shot, there had been a small passenger station used by the DL&W that was called "West Utica". Odd that they had another station this close to Utica Union, literally 1 mile as the crow flies, which I'm sure contributed to it's elimination. 

The old NYO&W freight house stands towards the middle of Utica Yard, although it hasn't seen a train since the O&W's abandonment in '57. According to those who were around back then, it wore an O&W sign until at least 1967. Its been a variety of businesses, including most recently it was a "artist's loft". Those seem to be all the rage in this area; every old building and a lot of new construction are now expensive apartments deemed to be "artist's lofts". They don't seem to contribute to the (dreadful) economy any, the cities are falling apart, people are leaving the area and they all seem to fail shortly after renovation/opening, but they still keep building them. I'm getting off topic though. But, this "artist loft" failed and tghe building is up for sale, and every time this thing comes up for sale, I fear that the next buyer is going to level it and redevelop the lot. Other than the station/headquarters at Middletown, which are partially burned and have the roof going in, this is the largest remaining structure from the O&W.

While I was there, this CSX eastbound freight came crawling into the yard and stopped, with the power eventually uncoupling and going down to grab cars out of the NYS&W yard. At the head end was ES44DC #5500. I went closer to get a photo, just because #5500 seems like kind of a neat round number.

Up close I noticed that this had the "Spirit of Cincinnati" lettering on the cab, which someone wiped clean. A few years back, CSX introduced these "Spirit Of" units, which were applied to a bunch of random units and had city names that were associated with railroading. There were some oddly obscure ones (Dante, Magnolia, Mulberry) and some odd omissions (All of them were west or south, no northeast locations like Selkirk or Buffalo or Dewitt), and then some of them were states instead of cities (West Virginia, Maryland). The whole thing was really weird. This was around the same time that CSX also introduced the "emblem units". Rather than full-on heritage paint, these had small decals on the nose that were heritage lines. Pretty "blink and you'll miss 'em". I know I've seen the Georgia Railroad one, but I'm sure there's others I just never noticed. 

Behind it was an old EMD wide cab, with the much nicer old safety cab on it. I looked it up, and this was once an early SD70MAC, which then was rebuilt with modern electrical gear at the Huntingdon Shops as part of their "SD70AC" rebuild program. No clue why they dropped the M, since the M was for the safety cab and they still retained that. Even wilder was that, when I looked the number up, this had once been CSX #789, which had been "Spirit Of Nashville", although it apparently lost that designation when it went through the rebuild program. Still, wild that two of the "Spirit" units ended up on the same train.

So, I have made a map of Utica Yard to clarify things a little since it's kind of a weird place, with three distinct sections plus two additional railroads passing through. The big thing to remember is that at one point Utica was on track to be the fifth-largest city in the US and was served by multiple railroads. The New York Central was the primary tenant at Utica, with the mainline passing through, while Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and New York, Ontario & Western accessing it at the end of their branches. The New York, West Shore & Buffalo also served Utica, but passed through farther south, and once it was absorbed by the NYC in 1886 and became it's West Shore Line, that was strictly an express freight line with no passenger service, so it never needed to access Utica Union Station.

• White Rectangle: That is Utica Union Station, built in 1914 to serve the three railroads that ran passenger service. The NYC freight house and Railway Express Agency also extend off the eastern end of the building. This was also the NYC's Mohawk Division (Syracuse-Albany mainline) accounting division headquarters, which my great-grandfather was in charge of. Today it still serves Amtrak, as well as the Adirondack Railroad, and it's one of the last, if not the last, active train station that still has a barber shop. At it's peak there were 20 platform tracks, but that has been winnowed down to a tenth of that over the years. The walkway over the track is also a more recent addition, originally the outer tracks were accessed by underground tunnels, which I've heard were pretty frightful in their last years.  In addition to pretty much every main train in the Great Steel Fleet passing through here, you also had countless freights, locals, and connections to the RW&O and Adirondack divisions here, so it was a busy place.
• Red Line: That is Track 2, primarily eastbound. Track 1 and Track 2 were the old NYC mainline. East to New York City, west to Chicago. The mainline was quadruple-tracked from Kirkville (just east of Syracuse) to Hommans (just west of Schenectady) back in the day, but NYC trimmed it down to 2 tracks in the Perlmann era.
• Dark Blue Line: That is Track 1, primarily westbound, since NYC/Conrail/CSX/Amtrak all observe right-side running. Yes, it confuses Amtrak riders to no end that Track 1 is the track further from the station.
• Yellow Rectangle: That's where the Adirondack Railroad stores their equipment and boards their trains. I guess if you follow the backwards numbering scheme, that's Track 0.
• Yellow Line: That's the old Utica & Black River line, which was taken over by the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg, which was taken over by the NYC and became the RW&O Division and that goes north to Remsen, then heads to Boonville, Lowville and Carthage. After the original Adirondack Division line to Herkimer was severed, this also became the southern end of the Adirondack Division. Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern owns the line and runs up to Remsen and then heads northwest to Boonville, while the Adirondack Railroad runs up it to Remsen and heads northeast to Tupper Lake.
• Cyan Line and Cyan Rectangle: This is the old New York Central portion of the yard, now operated by Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern, a subsidiary of Genesee Valley Transportation. This yard stub-ends to the east, there's no customers further up that way. They either head up to Boonville on the yellow line, or head west to Rome on Track 1 via CSX trackage rights. They run track speeds on CSX, which makes MA&N "operators of the fastest Alcos in the western hemisphere", as Genesee Valley Transportation founder and president David Monte Verde likes to joke.
• Maroon Rectangle (inside Cyan Rectangle): MA&N's new construction shop/engine house. This holds their four Alcos: C425s #2453, #2455, #2456 and M420W #2042.
• Pink Rectangle (inside Cyan Rectangle): The old NYC yard office. Long disused and in a state of considerable disrepair.
• Brown Rectangle: Hard to see but west of Genesee Street and the station. That's the old NYO&W freight house. The O&W called it quits on March 31st of 1957. I'm honestly not sure of the exact routing that the O&W took to reach Utica Station, although I know it came up from the south. The roadbed has been completely obliterated by urban development.
• Purple Rectangle: That's the ex-DL&W/Erie-Lackawanna Yard, now used by the New York Susquehanna & Western. Conrail ended up with this line originally, but handed it over to the Susquehanna in 1980-1981.
• Orange Rectangle (inside Purple Rectangle): That's the old E-L freight house, which housed the NYSW Utica offices, until they sold the building off to Utica Coffee Roasting Company. I believe Robert M. Delevan's Susquehanna Locomotive & Railcar Repair Services Inc. (his rebuilder/lease business after he closed down RMDI in Pittston) was working out of there too.
• Mango Rectangle (Inside Purple Rectangle): NYS&W's new single-stall enginehouse that they built after selling off the old freight house.
• Black Rectangle: That's the old NYC 16-stall roundhouse, now used by International Paper. You had Mohawk Division, Adirondack Division and RW&O Division trains all originating from Utica, so the service facilities were definitely needed. There are no tracks to it anymore, and the center pit has been filled it and roofed over, but the outline is distinct.
• Purple Line: That's the old DL&W Utica Branch, now the NYS&W Utica Branch. Continue southwest and it hit Schuyler Street, and this continues down to Sangerfield in terms of active trackage. It actually continues even further south to Chenango Forks, where it meets the Syracuse Branch coming from the northwest, and then into Binghamton, where they head east to Port Jervis, Maybrook, Sparta Junction and eventually Little Ferry. The line from Sangerfield to Chenango Forks has been dormant since around 2007 for lack of customers, although the NYS&W keeps the tracks maintained and makes a move over it once in a while to show that it still can be used.
• Green Circle: There was, at one point, a DL&W turntable in that area that was active into the Erie-Lackawanna era. It fell into disuse sometime before Conrail took over, and the NYS&W inherited it. Doug Ellison, who was VP of Engineering for the NYS&W, mentioned that when Walter Rich bought his Chinese SY Mikado, which became NYS&W #142, Rich tasked Ellison with trying to get the turntable in some state of operation, since Rich wanted to bring the #142 up to Utica. According to Doug Ellison, the pit and table were in good shape, but all the electric motors had been removed at some point, the center support bearing was absolutely FUBAR, and the outer rollers were completely missing. The electric motors weren't a big deal, because it could have been towed around with a tractor, but the rest of it prevented that from happening. The #142 did come up to Utica and made a couple of excursions, ran up the Adirondack line a couple times, and was even once used on UT-1, but once the Adirondack Railroad got the line open from Utica to Thendara for regular trips, Walter Rich mostly kept it south on the original NYS&W out of Sparta Junction or out of Syracuse. According to Ellison, Walter Rich didn't want to be stealing the Adirondack's thunder.

Hope that makes the whole location make a little more sense.