Posts Tagged ‘Norfolk Southern’
Lake Elizabeth, and 2 Hey Now’s
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Swindell Bridge to North Shore, part six.
After walking down from Federal Street, here in Pittsburgh, and then through a section of the Mexican War Streets neighborhood, your humble narrator soon found himself loathsomely occupying a two cubic meter patch of the space at Allegheny Commons Park.
They’ve got a manmade lake in there, dubbed ‘Lake Elizabeth.’
I was just passing through, on my way to a rail trench which bisects the park. This is a cool location for railfanning, and there’s usually a few guys (it’s always guys, you don’t meet many lady rail fans, or at least I don’t) sticking a lens through the fences here. I’m often one of these guys.
That horrible thing with the camera, over there, too terrible to behold – that’s me.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hey Now!
Norfolk Southern’s #4309 appeared. It was a train. That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.
Also, I very nearly fumbled these shots, due to being a clumsy idiot.
I’d spend the rest of the afternoon in a broad ranging self critique after nearly fumbling them, as that’s all it takes to set me off into a spell.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One of the ‘things’ which you have to manage, when wandering about American Cities with a camera, are the various straps, pouches, and cases that the ‘gear’ lives in. It’s important to pat down your pockets periodically to ensure that everything – lens caps, etc. – are where you think they are. A little bit of ‘OCD’ is actually helpful.
I was right in the middle of doing all that when this train showed up, which meant that I had to position the camera and set the exposure triangle in just under a second or two to ‘catch the shot.’
Whew!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One moved to another position, on the bridge which carries local streets over these trenched tracks in the park, and another Norfolk Southern train appeared, heading in the opposite direction to the former one.
Hey Now!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Your humble narrator was ‘enroute’ to a light rail station where a ride back to HQ awaited, and given the peculiarities of Pittsburgh’s street layouts and river crossings, the path that brought me here is one which I commonly transit through.
Lucky for me, this train trench turns this ‘zone’ into what I call ‘a feature rich environment.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I still can’t run, but I did ‘quick step’ across the bridge to other side to get a shot of the train’s transit. Black minerals, likely coal or coke.
Back tomorrow with the penultimate steps of this scuttle.
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All sideyed, at Conway
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As described yesterday, during a lament about a Shell Plant found further north/west along the Ohio River, I had some rather mundane stuff to take care of ‘up here’ – about 25 miles north of Pittsburgh ‘proper.’
I had planned a couple of hours of ‘me time’ into the obligation, and spent about an hour of it lurking on a street called ‘Fourth Avenue’ in Freedom, PA., while staring at the Norfolk Southern Conway Yard.
Positively, there are better angles to see this gargantua of a rail yard from, but killing time is killing time, even if it only offers ‘profile’ shots.
from Wikipedia:
- Freedom is a borough in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, United States, along the Ohio River. The population was 1,496 at the 2020 census.[3] It is 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Pittsburgh and is part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Originally founded as a steamboat-building town, it later became known for producing oil and caskets in the 20th century.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One was sitting in the car, fairly obviously, and for some reason I love this shot from within the Mobile Oppression Platform’s cabin, accidentally captured while pulling my camera out of its bag.
I’m going to have to do a bunch of research on Conway Yard, and figure out locations for better points of view. Also, have to make sure that the camera is shut off while within its bag.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One set of switcher locomotives caught my eye, as they shuttled lines of train cars from one track to the next. They had an atypical paint job for Norfolk Southern, which usually means that it’s got some ‘one off’ pollution control or fuel saving gizmo at its heart. Something they’ll roll out for politicians or investors to see at press events.
Notably, Conway Yard was once a prized property of the Pennsylvania Rail Road company.
from Wikipedia:
- Conway Yard (also known as Conway Terminal) is a major rail yard located in the boroughs of Conway, Pennsylvania, and Freedom, Pennsylvania, 22 miles (35 km) northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along the Ohio River. It was the largest freight yard in the world from 1956 until 1980. It is currently owned by Norfolk Southern (NS) and is one of the largest yards in the United States and on the east coast.
- Conway is the only remaining large operation of the four early-20th century PRR yards. NS processes 90,000 to 100,000 cars per month (as of 2003). The site occupies 568 acres, with 181 miles (291 km) of track and a storage capacity of over 11,000 cars and is a hump yard.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I must’ve been hanging around Freedom for about an hour, waiting for something interesting to happen. As I often say, my kind of photography is a whole lot like fishing. You can’t make a fish bite a hook.
So – That’s what Freedom, PA.’s Fourth Avenue looks like, incidentally, directly paralleling the rail yard. These shots were gathered right about here. Nice residential homes, most likely built under the ‘mill town’ model.
All the reading I’ve been doing about coal has kind of bled into me recognizing the sorts of homes which would be offered to miners. I’ve come to be able to recognize these ‘miner houses,’ but there seems to be several prevalent styles of residence which can fit into either description. The ones above are a few notches higher on my ‘size, livability, and quality’ meter than miner houses are.
The latter form are essentially brick boxes with as few a number of windows as the bosses could get away with installing. You’ll see some of those in the near future.
Coal is a fascinating subject, but this post is about Conway, the existence of which is – tangentially speaking – consequential of coal, but there we are. It’s all connected.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A Towboat was navigating down the Ohio River, which was visually interesting, but these shots really disappoint me and I actually considered not running them. It’s that patchwork of horizontal lines. There’s nothing technically wrong with them, it’s just… I dunno.
I’ll definitely be back to this ‘zone’ sometime this summer, but I have a bunch of googling to do first. ‘Rail fanning locations near Conway Yard’ is likely going to be one of my first queries to the Googleplex before I do. I also imagine YouTube is going to come in handy here.
I had to get on with the utter mundanity which had brought me up north, so a last shot or two of those long horizontal lines, with trains in them, were cracked out before firing up the MOP’s engine and hurtling off into space again.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Neat, huh? Good thing I had that green swoosh to frame around. Bah!
Mitch’s rules of composition include: ‘triangles!,’ ‘Z’ shapes, and that whereas one thing in a shot is best, three is cool too, but there should no more than five. Odd is better than even. Establishing shot, medium, up, down, all around, close up. Pay no attention to the man behind the camera, folks, he’s busy.
Back tomorrow with something different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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West Virginia’s Weirton
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Scouting, scouting, scouting.
This shot was actually from the Steubenville, Ohio side of the Ohio River, with West Virginia’s Weirton shoreline visible behind that Towboat.
While shooting these on the Ohio side, a car pulled up and two Juggalo’s got out with a bevy of fishing equipment. They were fully committed to the ICP, as they had facial tattoos of clown makeup and told me they were planning to ‘catch catfish for suppah’ from the Ohio River.
Of course I had to chat with the Juggalo’s. Who am I?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Over in Weirton, on the West Virginia side, the ‘big show’ is the massive Weirton Steel Corporation mill – owned by the Cleveland Cliffs outfit – and it was fully shuttered back in 2024 after years and years of industrial activity. This mill used to be the single largest employer in the entire state of West Virginia. I’ve seen numbers stretching as high as 7,500 – as far as numbers of lost steel worker jobs.
Seriously, this is one of the largest industrial operations I’ve ever seen. Bigger than a battleship, and in fact – if you wanted to build a battleship you’d pretty much have to start doing it right here.
Most definitely going to be coming back this way in the future.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A rail spur travels through the central footprint of this mill, and my advance scouting via the Google Maps service suggested that a small rail bridge was nearby. I parked the car in a municipal lot associated with the local government and walked over to that bridge.
I felt it coming before I heard it coming, and I heard it coming before I saw it coming… Hey Now!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The air gets compressed when a train is nearing, and the thrumming of its diesel engine is palpable. As is my habit, I got my exposure triangle in order for this shot.
Come on already… sheesh… I’m so impatient.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Norfolk Southern #5342 appeared, towing a short line of mostly tank cars.
Again, a member of the railroader crew was observed riding on the nose of the engine and looking intently down at the trackage as they went. I’ve been seeing a LOT of this sort of activity lately, specifically by Norfolk Southern employees.
Any ideas, railfans? What do you think they’re doing?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The train continued on, heading away on that spur which leads through the closed Weirton mill. I stopped off at a couple of other spots on my way back to the highway to Pittsburgh, but didn’t ‘get’ anything worth sharing.
About 15 minutes later, I was heading for the road back to Pittsburgh, and saw this train again, in the distance.
I’ll definitely be coming back here for a second taste sometime.
Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Hey Now, yet again
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was Palm Sunday, and… well, what do y’all think us Jews do when you Goyem are in your churches, communing with your god?
This ‘hebe’ was out taking pictures of trains.
After having captured shots of another Norfolk Southern freight unit hurtling past from a point of elevation over the tracks (yesterday’s post), one scuttled about a city block east at the edge of the South Side Flats zone, and then found a pile of big rocks to sit on while waiting for #872 up there to arrive.
Sated, I moved on.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I didn’t have any sort of plan for this part of the walk, just following my nose and kicking my feet around. Eventually, I’d need to get back to the T Light Rail’s Station Square stop, which is about a mile or so from the spot pictured above. Movement, that’s what I was after.
Hey, I don’t think I’ve walked that way yet, wonder what’s there?
As usual, I was the singular pedestrian.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Street Furniture was encountered, and somebody must seriously regret not dealing with this couch prior to a rainstorm which blew through Pittsburgh the previous night. Sheesh. Hell, back in NYC, this sofa would already be in somebody else’s living room. A lot of people don’t lock their cars up here, or even their houses when they go out. Can you imagine?
My toes were pointed, in the direction I needed to go.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another view of the South Tenth Street Bridge, complimenting yesterday’s more aerial POV from those high flying City Steps up in the South Side Slopes. I’ve noticed a serious drop off in foot traffic in this area in the last few months. Wonder why?
I figured on being RR greedy, and headed down towards the trackage of CSX, but they weren’t busy – at all. Nothing was coming through.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
More street furniture was encountered.
Littering and dumping in Brooklyn and Queens was always done in a somewhat artistic way. You wouldn’t just abandon a couch like this, you’d need to ‘eff it up a bit,’ maybe even set it on fire before abandoning it. Paint some obscene graffiti on it. Maybe include a sort of explosive into the plan… something… give the couch a Viking funeral. It’s been loyal.
That sort of thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I keep on reminding myself that ‘every walk doesn’t have to be an exodus,’ and accordingly kept on heading back towards transit. There’s a T light rail unit crossing the Monongahela River via the Panhandle Bridge, which was the last shot from this one.
Back next week with something – completely – different.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Descending to… Hey Now!
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To start this one off: the peculiarities of the Newtown Pentacle time warp are still in effect, as the shots in today’s post were gathered back on the 29th of March. Just in case you’re wondering why you’re seeing bare trees and all that in mid May.
Your humble narrator had resolved, at the end of the hostile frigid season, to really lean into things when it warmed up and another one of my little aphorisms to simplify life is ‘do what you say, say what you do.’
One found himself, thereby, in the South Side Slopes section of Pittsburgh and scuttling down a steeply graded road called Arlington Avenue. The main goal of this walk was to exercise the big muscle found in the center of my chest, so I was scuttling along at a pretty good clip.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Didn’t have much of a plan, and this walk played out through an area that’s become fairly familiar territory for me. I used the ‘Lauer Way’ City Steps to descend down to the ‘flats,’ rather than following the measured parabola of Arlington Avenue.
The PTSD thing about steps is continuing to recede into an emotional ‘Davy Jones locker’ that I maintain – deep within a section of the brain where I store things away I don’t want to think about anymore. That memory is now neatly tucked away, right between my Dad’s Pancreatic Cancer and my Mom’s end stage Dementia. I’ve got a whole folder of events in there for all the times I’ve been punched in the face, or when I said something stupid or hateful too.
All the fun stuff, it’s found in my box of psychic pain.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I wasn’t so much scuttling here, it was a lot more like shambling. Occasionally, one would turn stiffly at the waist and then gesture the camera at something, while making a sound like ‘urhhhnnnn.’
That’s the South 10th street bridge, over the Monongahela River, pictured above. The location within these hills that I was walking down from would be analogous to Pittsburgh’s South 12th street, if I was standing on the flood plain below where the South Side Flats neighborhood is found.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I was heading for an ‘ole reliable.’
That’s the 12th street pedestrian bridge pictured above, overflying the Norfolk Southern RR trackage which snakes along the side of Mount Washington on the landform’s Monongahela facing side. I’ve come to understand that Norfolk Southern uses the former tracks and right of way of the Pennsylvania Rail Road. I walk by this spot a lot.
I was outfitted with a ‘railfan’ scanner radio for this one, and radio chatter suggested that ‘something’ was coming this way, so I found an opportune spot and then switched lenses over to something that could easily poke through chain link fencing without occlusion.
Specifically, an 85mm f2 prime lens.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Hey Now!
Norfolk Southern #4600 thundered past, hauling a line of empty mineral cars. An attempt at squirreling out its model typology and build history ended up getting squished by a more historic NS Freight Train that once bore the same number. Again, not a railfan, I just like taking pictures of trains.
Saying that, of course, there I stood with a scanner radio on a Sunday…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The plan was to head a block or two away to the east, after achieving flat ground, and hope for another train sighting, specifically of one coming from the opposite direction. It seems that when a train is observed going one way, it’s likely that another one is coming from the counter direction shortly afterwards. Guess they try and time it out that way to avoid roadway disruptions.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 