Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: railway

An interior shot from our 1999 trip on Pennsylvania's Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad .

Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.

NP's dock is/was right next to the Great Northern's ore dock complex at Allouez (Superior), Wisconsin. GN's Dock Three, which was wooden, has been removed and the only dock which is currently in use is Dock Five, which is newer and which was built to move ore with conveyors, not trains. The others in the set, including this one, are no longer attached to the tracks. The GN dock is now a BNSF facility, of course. Shot from the parking lot of a gas station. I didn't know you could get this close to the dock, or I'd have photographed it before....

This was the New York Central depot in Springport, Michigan. This photograph continues my exploration of the LS&MS Lansing line ; there will be more photographs as I locate and/or take them. It also begins a brief exploration of Springport, which I visited one afternoon in 1988. According to this article by Frank Passic of Albion, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern tracks from Jonesville to Lansing were laid in 1872. The tracks north of Springport were removed in 1940, which made this little building a terminal until the southern tracks were removed in 1968. This building has been restored , and now looks like this . Certainly appears that it was being maintained in the 80s. Camera: Minolta Freedom 100 ========= This track was built by the Northern Central Michigan Railroad Company, which was a front for the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. The LS&MS was, in turn, a captive/component of the New York Central. You've likely noticed that I care about this built by/owned by/merged with/trackage rights detail. Many railfans talk this way. History majors generally like checking this stuff out....

Detail from this photo . Shot through my windshield in downtown Lansing.

The best photo I took on our "accidental" visit to Port Huron's Desmond Landing. This tank was left behind when the Ferry Yard was abandoned. I presume it contained fuel for the switcher, but that could (of course) be all wrong....

Old CN roundhouse, with coaling and water tower ruins, Toronto. The Canadian National Railway used to have an enormous rail yard near downtown Toronto, which is marked by the CN Tower and partly occupied now by the SkyDome (Rogers Centre). This roundhouse, and a much smaller yard, are all that remain. You can see Lake Ontario in the background. The picture's a little noisy largely because I shot it through a window. Camera: FujiFilm FinePix F10 Photo by Joel Dinda

This picture was shot a mile or so from my workplace. The train's creeping along on the long siding by Lake Interstate (an artifact of the construction of I-69, friends) and will halt before it gets to the crossing. Presumably there was a train coming the other way. I kinda like the blackbird atop the sign....

The tracks are still here, but the trains no longer stop, and much of the elevator complex has been demolished. Mulliken was a farm town for about a century. There was a grocery store, a lumberyard, a hardware store. A church, a school, a barber, a library, a beauty shop, a couple bars, a restaurant that served breakfast. A gas station. A post office. And this grain elevator. The lumberyard was already gone when I moved here in 1991. This feed, grain, & seed operation closed two or three years after I took these photos. The hardware failed around 2000. The school's been gone for years, as have the hair cutters. Boyer's no longer serves gasoline, though John can still fix your pickup. The grocery's evolved into a party store, and Farmers Tavern's been a full-service restaurant since the 80s. In many ways, now, we've become a rather distant Lansing suburb. We aren't entirely commuters--a surprising number of my neighbors work as plumbers, and these days our biggest local business is a general contractor. But the farmers ship grain, and buy seed, at Sunfield , or Grand Ledge, or Woodbury. I miss 'em.

The former PM mainline--now the CSX line between Chicago and Detroit--through Mulliken, Michigan. Shot from Railroad Street, looking west.

I ducked by CN's Cory Yard this morning--it serves the large General Motors assembly plant in Delta Township, near Lansing--and found only this locomotive and a single car on the property. In contrast, the yard within the auto plant's boundaries seemed to be full. I suspect there's a problem with the exiled car.... Regardless, the loco's Illinois Central (IC) 9637, a GP38, of which there are plenty of photographs on the web in a variety of paint schemes. When Cory Yard was new we'd mostly see switchers wearing IC and GTW garb, but CN's apparently unified most everything since. I perhaps should mention Cory's not the world's most interesting rail yard--it serves one facility, and that plant does the sorting of the "goods" before the trains are loaded. It's next door to where I worked, and for me it's been an occasional subject since it was built.

The crew in the caboose. Connersville, Indiana, in 1993. I'm thinking the train was arriving from Metamora and that we were on the grounds of the local Masonic temple (which was more like a big house). 'Twas a long time ago, now.... We'd soon board the train ourselves. Enjoyed the ride, but weren't much impressed with Metamora, though we liked the barge on the canal. The trains still run; information here . I'm pretty sure I took this photo with a Chinon Genesis III.