Ohio Valley Railroads

Last week I was intrigued by an article in the Wall Street Journal that compared Warren Buffet to the late Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt practically created the New York Central, but beyond that I knew very little about the man.

I stopped at our campus library and picked up the book Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The book provides a length narrative detailing from birth till death and every major life event along the way. It details how Vanderbilt went from nothing to go on and create his massive family fortune, first through sail, then steamships, and finally the railroads.

Additional detail is spent on the more troubling aspects of his personal life that might not be found in older works on the subject. Vanderbilt had a habit of picking up less than respectable girls from the waterfront. In fact advanced syphilis would directly lead to his death.

The author, Edward J. Renehan Junior, goes to great lengths to provide a well-researched book. He mentions a number of facts where previous biographies do not agree with his sources and provides great backing of his opinions.

As a biography the work is splendid. As a railroad book it is not so much. Only one of the 24 chapters deals significantly with the railroads and Vanderbilt's business actions when he executed a couple of famous cornerings of the Hudson River Railroad and the New York and Harlem Railroad. Later mention is made of his failure to corner the Erie Railroad against Jay Gould.

Later Vanderbilt would merge his major New York Railroads with the New York Central, a road operating from Buffalo to Albany. This created the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, a single railroad company all the way from Manhattan to Buffalo.

I don't really fault the author for the lack of railroad information. I did not realize that the majority of Vanderbilt's railroad dealing were late in his life. His son, William Vanderbilt went on to help mold the New York Central's western expansions. Instead, most of Vanderbilt's life was spend on the steamship business and the book is proportioned accordingly. It did not detract from my enjoyment in the least.

After reading this book, would I compare Vanderbilt to Buffet? Probably not. Though the two both invested heavily in railroads during their later years, I find them to be different in both personality and temperament.If you want to make your own decision I encourage you to check out Commodore at Amazon.

So I learned a new trick this week. When using Google News you can use a special location tag followed by a semicolon to narrow your search. For instance, by searching "railroad location:oh" I can get all the railroad news stories from the Ohio area.

Now with that out of the way, here are some interesting railroad articles from around the web.

• A long legal battle to get a private overpass replaced on the Ohio Central may be closer to a conclusion. Lawyers from the state (who now owns the line and leases it to the OC) can find no documentation that removes responsibility. I can just imagine all the fun digging around in PRR archives looking for that.
• Plans are being discussed to build a biketrail along the Mill Creek Corridor in Cincinnati. While not exactly a rail trail it would most likely have good views of the action near Union Terminal.
• Lastly there is a great article on Canton Railroad history. One of the "Images of Rail" series is publishing a volume on Canton.

In other news, I've put up some of my central Ohio photos up on the Ohio Valley Railroads Facebook Page.I'm also taking submissions now for an Ohio Railway calendar. If you have an event you would like to be on it let me know.

I decided to start a new series looking at the major yards in Ohio. Since the size of a "major" classification yard is a bit arbitrary and Ohio has plenty of rail yards and former rail yards, I'm sticking active hump yards. Hump yards work by using gravity to sort cars rolling down a hill or "hump". Retarders and mechanical switches keep everything working smoothly.

• CSX: Stanley Yard - Toledo
• CSX: Queensgate Yard - Cincinnati
• CSX: Willard Yard - Willard
• NS: Bellevue Yard - Bellevue

Special mention also goes out to the recently mothballed Buckeye Yard. These days the bowl of tracks below the hump is being used for car storage.

Stanley Yard

Stanley Yard, located in Lake Township, was constructed by the Toledo & Ohio Central in 1913. It was first use as a hump yard in 1930, although in these days brakemen riding on the backs of cars served the same purpose as the modern automatic retarder systems of today.

The T&OC was leased by the New York Central System in 1922 and formally merged into the larger company in 1938. The yard became part of the ill-fated Penn Central merger in 1968 and eventually made its way through the Conrail breakup, becoming part of CSX in 1998. Over time the Penn Central and Conrail consolidated many of their Toledo-area operations in Stanley Yard.


In 1996 Conrail reportedly sorted 450 to 700 cars per day at the yard, with only 1 shift operating. Under CSX the classification hump was actually closed for a time in 2004, however it has since reopened and appears to be safe for the near future. Judging by the article the CSX system seems to struggle without its use. The photo to the right was taken at the Stanley Hump in 2005. The tracks in the foreground is the staging yard, with the classification bowl in the far background.

Interesting to note, the first area of CTC track ever operated ran from Stanley Yard to Berwick, OH.

For those wishing to photograph Stanley Yard, it is located in a relatively open area off of Walbridge Road. It is recommended to avoid the actual hump area itself (especially post-9/11) but CSX is usually pretty easy on railfans who don't get too close to the other tracks.

References:

1. Michael Rhodes. North American Railyards. MBI October 2003.
2. "Stanley Yard". Michigan Railroads.

Other than a book or two, I'm not very familiar with the railroad scene in Toledo. Hopefully this was an acceptable overview. Any other yard you would like to see in the series? Let me know in the comments.

Ready for a few more financial musings? While the rest of the rail industry continues to ride the Buffet bounce things could be looking better for RailAmerica.

After going public again a little more than a month ago the stock has continued a slow slide on light volume from it's opening price of $15. Fortress Investment Group, who took the company private in 2006, originally wanted $16 to $18 a share for this IPO. Fortress paid $16.35 per share when they bought RailAmerica.

In other I&O news, Aaron Border recently put up this video on rail-videos.net. It shows the Delta-Lima turn returning to the former DT&I from the now CSX-owned ex-B&O.