Conneaut-based NS local C62 descends the steep hillside spur at Welch Foods in Westfield, NY after pulling one loaded tank car of fresh grape juice with 3452, the last snoot-nose unit on NS.
Of all the industry shots I’ve amassed in my few short years with a camera, this is the only one to feature a full-fledged bridge separating me from the customer. While it’d be just as easy to walk down to the spur from the east side of the bridge, I couldn’t pass up this unique angle offered here. The bridge has existed since the days of this line being owned by the Nickel Plate, and although I’ve never been able to find any info on its construction, it’s easily more than a few decades old. Welch itself tends to be an elusive customer, being in the grape business and therefore relying on growing seasons to provide ample supplies. Sometimes they can be served regularly, once or twice a week, and at the opposite end they can go an entire month without seeing a car placed or pulled. These factors only seem to apply to the Westfield location, as there is also a plant in North East, PA some 15 miles west of here. The two sites work in tandem in fact; loaded tank cars from Westfield will end up in North East at a later date for unloading and presumably refining/packaging/distribution. One might say well why not just ship by truck if they’re so close together? That I don’t have an answer for. The capacity of the North East location however is well more than double the number of cars Westfield can fit (up to four at a time).
This is one of the aspects of railroading I find most fascinating: when customers ship internally between their sites, or merely the simple fact a train car’s loading point and unloading point. In this case, many of the cars which come to Westfield for loading often stay local to the area, later returning for more loading after being unloaded in North East. By happenstance I found out there is a Welch location all the way out in Grandview, Washington southeast of Yakima. I stumbled upon this revelation while tracing some recent cars to end up in Westfield, and their statuses came back as released by the customer in Grandview. As it turns out, there too is a Welch Foods plant, served by the Washington Central Railroad. Many of the car numbers seen via street view are in the same number class as the ones which populate Westfield and North East, furthering the idea of keeping those tank cars internal. For all I know, Welch may full on lease those cars to keep them purely in their network. Goes to show you never know what you’ll find sometimes when tracing rail cars. Having adopted the strategy of paying attention to car numbers two years ago, it has far and away helped me to shoot the more difficult customers I encounter, whose switching schedule may not be so obvious or concrete. Before I started trying to shoot Welch, I was under the impression that C62 went out there a couple times a week regularly, purely based on days and times when the local would pass the North East rail cam on YouTube. Among the railfan collective, there also exists a Google spreadsheet log of trains ran by railfans who update the sheet with train info and times as seen on the cam. As a fun little aside, Welch in North East may qualify as the only industry whose switching is viewable from a public online rail cam. I have not gone through and checked the location of every Virtual Railfan cam, so I can’t say for sure, but again just another unique tidbit for the NY/PA border region.
While I probably could have had this shot sooner if I’d settled, I made things a little more difficult on myself by waiting for 3452 to face properly, in this case west. The power for C62 is often times a solo SD40. The power is shared between this local and a night job which can run a transfer, usually turning on a wye as part of their work. Thus, the direction the power faces typically changes once, sometimes twice a week. The customers belonging to C62 have no set service days, and are all eligible for switching Monday through Friday (and occasionally the weekend should an extra run). The week prior to this shot, I faced one of the most frustrating outings I’ve ever attempted. Having been out early in the morning for a couple things around Buffalo, and while waiting on the South Buffalo Railway to do something they ultimately did not do that day, I saw a message from my friend Aidan that C62 had passed North East with tanks for Westfield about 15 minutes ago. This already set me back, and so I hastily walked back to my car, abandoning another not often seen event on Buffalo Southern, a double-header of Alcos pulling a big storage run. C62 would still have to run around their train east of Welch, which I’d hoped would buy me some time. Perhaps a road train would be in the picture and further delay them, but that wasn’t the case that day. Jumping on I-90 west, I immediately ran into several miles of one lane highway with a major repaving project underway which I failed to account for. Not having the foresight to get off at the nearest exit and circumvent the work, I suffered further delays trailing in traffic at very low speeds. Once out of the zone, it was full bore speed all the way to Westfield. By the time I reached this exact spot, I looked across the bridge to see the conductor lining the switch for the main as the engineer tied onto their train, the cars already spotted. Devastated did not begin to describe the feelings of anguish and rage washing over me. I drove back home in total silence, 60 miles on the highway. I didn’t talk to a single person for nearly the rest of the day. Out of desperation, before leaving the scene I still stopped closer to the plant to grab car numbers in the hopes it would help me at a later date. I didn’t anticipate that day coming so soon the following week. Miraculously, the cars worked on CSX TouchTrace, stating they were empty and placed at industry with the correct location, date, and time. TouchTrace tends to be unreliable when it comes to NS happenings, but this was an exception. Tracing the cars daily each morning, I awoke to one of the cars coming back as "no status available," which I took to mean the car had been released. TouchTrace for whatever reason could not recognize that into the actual "released by the customer" status, but I took the gamble anyways. I decided to be proactive and start my drive out to Westfield well before C62 passed the North East cam this time. When I was getting close to the exit, they finally appeared heading east, and so I set up shop. With one road train close by to pass them, it didn’t take long for the run around to be completed. The engine still faced west, which doubled my excitement for the chance at redemption. While I still take flack from the snoot enthusiasts for not having "shot the nose properly up close," being told "that’s the whole point of shooting the snoot," I’m still happy with this shot. Thrilled really. It remains one of my favorite scenes compositionally. While my original plan was to follow the job further west to nab another customer shot, a place called Rehrig in Erie, PA for whom the covered hopper was for, I got word from my main CSX contact that another rare move was on the docket in Niagara Falls that evening. The newly appointed afternoon yard job would be making a run up to Tam Ceramics to pull cars from a recent high and wide move. Surprise surprise, they weren’t the ones to do so, but it still ended up happening with another job. Nabbing a third obscure customer shot in between this one and Tam, it made for a truly perfect day out, one of those days which comes around maybe a couple or three times a year.
Posted by pjkaz177 on 2024-11-13 19:12:14
Tagged: , Norfolk Southern , NS , Westfield , New York , Welch , Welch Foods , Grape Juice , Industry , Industry Photography , Industrial , Industrial Plant , Train Bridge , Trestle , Train Conductor , Low Angle , Trains , Train Photography , Railroad , Railroad Photography , Summertime , Local Train , Snoot Nose , 3452
