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Trackside Around Louisville West 1947-1958 with Jack Fravert Morning Sun Books
Trackside Around Louisville (West) 1947-1958 with Jack Fravert by Charles B Castner, John Campbell, Charles Buccola & Rick Tipton Morning Sun Books
Hard Cover w/ dust jacket
128 pages
Copyright 2006
CONTENTS
Introduction 3
Louisville as Traffic Magnet 3
Trackside Photographer Jack Fraver 3
The Two Volumes of Trackside Around Louisville with Jack Fravert 3
The Baltimore & Ohio in Southern Indiana5
North Vernon Indiana, 1956 5
O&M Main 10
B&O Excursion to Mitchell Persimmon Festival Excursion 15
North Vernon, 1957 21
Railroads on the Indiana Bank of the Ohio River 22
The Hoosier Line (Morron) 22
The Panhandle's New Albany Branch (PRR) 26
B&O at Charlestown Indiana 26
B&O at New Albany 28
VI Tower (B&O, Monon, Southern, K&IT, PRR)28
Kentucky & Indiana Terminal - home of three roads 32
K&IT History 32
K&IT Switchers at Work 34
Monon at Youngtown 37
B&O at Youngtown 41
Trains at Central Station (IC, NYC, C&O, SR, B&O) 54
Central Station history 54
NYC, SR, and IC Passenger Trains at Central Station 55
The B&O at Central Station 58
C&O Passenger Service at Central and Union Stations 63
Southern Railway around Louisville 1947-1958 64
The Southern in Indiana and Illinois - St. Louis Division (the "Air Line") 64
The Southern in Kentucky -
Louisville Division (the "LS")64
The Southern in Louisville 65
Southern Railway at Youngtown Yard 66
Southern Trains Passing Through Louisville 72
30th Street 74
Southern in New Albany and West to Huntingburg 81
Illinois Central, the last bastion of steam 84
Oak St Yard - 2-10-2s and 0-8-0s 86
Hodgenville Branch local 88
Viewing Oak Street Yard 95
Getting Out of Town - South from Oak St 102
On to Central City 106
Oak Street's Roundhouse 108
The Final Days of Steam in Louisville 115
Excursion Runs 117
Some Louisville Area Curiosities 118
The Corydon RR (LNA&C) 118
Ferdinand Railroad 124
Louisville Cement Company 126
A Few Interesting Cars 127
ABOUT THE BOOK
In our first volume (East), we began a look at Louisville railroading, as seen through Jack's cameras. Concentrating on Jack's early color work, we moved roughly counterclockwise around the city, starting with hometown Louisville & Nashville at Union Station and South Louisville, then to L&N's East Louisville yard and out to the suburbs. Next we met Chesapeake & Ohio as it came in from Lexington on L&N trackage rights and terminated with New York Central at Preston Street. We saw the NYC get here by trackage rights on the Baltimore & Ohio. And finally we showed that although the Pennsylvania entered the city with its own bridge, yards, engine terminal, and industrial switching districts, it partnered with the L&N at Louisville Union Station for passenger trains.
This second volume (West) continues our tour around Louisville-area railroads, featuring the four other Class 1 railroads that "had to come here" Three of them, Southern Railway, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Monon, resolved some of the early tangle by joining forces, crossing the Ohio River at New Albany and entering northwestern Louisville on the Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Railroad. At the K&IT roundhouse, Jack caught the end of Southern's steam power on both freight and passenger service, photographed the transition era on the B&O, and recorded the beginning of Monon's diesels. He also caught K&IT's switcher fleets - both steam and diesel.
The remaining Class 1, Illinois Central, came into Louisville from the southwest, coming from Memphis, Tennessee through Fulton and Paducah KY. As steam dies elsewhere, we'll follow Jack to the IC, the last of Louisville's railroads to fully dieselize. The IC operated big steam through most of the 1950's; in fact, with dieselization elsewhere on its lines, the IC brought bigger steam to its Kentucky Division in the last years before completing dieselization.
Finally, we feature glimpses of several Southern Indiana short lines, for the odd and the ancient. The operations of these small roads brought Jack and other fans to trackside in the 1950s, before they too phased out steam.
This time we start with Jack some miles north of Louisville, on the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio between Cincinnati and St. Louis...
Louisville as Traffic Magnet
In our first volume, Trackside Around Louisville (East) with Jack Fravert, 1948-1958, we described Louisville's growth from the late 1700's, first as a river port. Before the railroads came, the Ohio River and the Great Lakes were the most important transportation arteries in what was then called "the West". At Louisville, steamboat navigation was interrupted, with upstream (Pittsburgh) boats and downstream (St. Louis and New Orleans) boats landing goods to be portaged around the Falls of the Ohio. With the Ohio on its doorstep and tributary rivers nearby, Louisville was in the right place to be the principal wholesale and distribution point for parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.
The dream of railroads in the Louisville area became reality in the late 1840s and early 1850s, when local interests started at least five pioneering railroads from the Ohio River here, radiating outward toward "inland" points. Eventually, these early routes were acquired by larger rail systems, but their origin around the Falls of the Ohio attests to the wealth and enterprise of the area's business community. Once these railroads started running "trains of cars" to distant cities, Louisville (and its Indiana neighbors, Jeffersonville, Clarksville, and New Albany) gained access to wider wholesale markets and became a major manufacturing center as well.
Of course, Louisville was the home of the L&N Railroad, with its headquarters, main shops, and ultimately five main lines reaching out to the northeast, east, south, southeast, and west. But as the city grew, it was an important enough traffic source that it had to be tapped by every railroad system, near or far, that could get here. One measure of this was the 24 railroads (plus two never built) that had "Louisville" in their names.
By 1900, Louisville had 8 trunk line railroads and two local terminal switching operations. Each of these railroads acquired terminals as it could, and in our first volume we pointed out that Louisville was "a city of tangled terminals," with railroads crossing each other, running on each others' rails, and sharing joint yards and stations. That pattern was still true in Jack Fravert's day, and we will examine more of that tangle in this volume, as our tour of Louisville railroads continues.
Jack Fravert, Trackside Photographer
Jack Fravert (John B. Fravert, 1926-1998) was well qualified to record the railroading scene around the Louisville area. He combined the enthusiasm of a railfan with the perfectionist bent of a photo professional. Growing up in a railroading family in Louisville Kentucky, Jack trained as a US Army Signal Corps photographer, and continued with the technical education necessary to sell photographic supplies and equipment for a leading Louisville wholesaler. The result was a large body of work using the best films and cameras available, taken with an understanding of the railroad activities captured, and often with the cooperation of the railroaders involved. In the postwar years, his color slide work was a variety of films in 2inch format, but around 1952 Jack switched to 35mm slides, predominantly Kodachrome.
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