Archive for September 3rd, 2024
One Potato
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A birthday scuttle was underway, and your humble narrator was hoping to see a few locomotives along the way. Sometimes, you get lucky.
My path followed the Great Allegheny Passage bike and pedestrian trail down the shoreline of the Monongahela River, and this section of the facility offers several commanding views of Pittsburgh’s downtown cluster of office buildings, and several bridges, along the way.
It’s also mirrored by the Pittsburgh Subdivision’s right of way, owned by the CSX railroad outfit, so there’s a pretty good chance of seeing a few trains running through what’s basically a choke point for CSX’s operations.
If trains were Persian soldiers, and these tracks were Thermopylae, that would make me Leonidas. That’s madness, you say?
Dis is Spartah!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I spotted the first of what turned out to be several passing locomotives as it was transiting beneath the Fort Pitt Bridge. All of the land in this area used to be a rail yard owned by the now defunct Pittsburgh & Lake Erie RR outfit. Their yard property has been redeveloped as ‘Station Square,’ which hosts restaurants and bars as well as a couple of hotels and a Soccer Stadium in modernity. It’s also where the docks of the Gateway Clipper tourist boats are found. Saying that – CSX’s subdivision is still very active.
The three surviving U.S. Steel mills are found to the southeast, and CSX has an intermodal yard just west of Pittsburgh in an area called McKee’s Rocks. This location is more or less the middle point between those two other areas of interest. Lots of traffic.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
CSX #148 got close, and a humble narrator started a-clicking the shutter button as it did. Choo-Choo.
#148 was built in March of 1996, when the most popular toy in America was the ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ doll, and the #1 song on the national charts was ‘the Macarena.’ How popular was that song when #148 was spawned? Here’s Hillary Clinton clapping along with it at the DNC convention just a few months after #148 went to work.
#148 is a GE AC44CW model locomotive, I’m told.
Back tomorrow with more Choo-Choo.
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