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Caption: By the late 1990's Norfolk Southern's intermodal terminal in Dain City (near Welland) only had months left before closing. It was an interesting place, very compact as it was situated at the former Welland Junction, which vanished when the new Welland canal was built. The old main here was used to store NS power awaiting the next trip States side, as seen here with a SD70 and Dash-9. The NS caboose was a left over from when NS stopped using caboose on mainline trains in Canada, probably just months earlier. It wasn't long after CN turned the trackage here over to Trillium that NS pulled out as well. Today a translating facility is located here and all of NS' trains in Ontario are just a fading memory, with only a transfer job running between Buffalo and Fort Erie.
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Very cool to see.
Site now is a biodiesel plant – Verbio. There is transload on the Trillium network at the old Robun Hood (flour unloaded direct to truck and trucked to Fort Erie), and team tracks near SLM in Welland and apparently (per the website, this one I was unaware of) in Merriton too.
Thanks for the updates. I used to spend a lot of time down there but unfortunately not so much anymore.
This was for train 145 no? (Which became 445)
No this was a dedicated intermodal train. I’ll see if I can dig up the train number, I believe it is in my NS review book somewhere.
Correct – I was under the impression in 1994-ish there were trains NS 327/8, 434/433 (to Detroit), and NS 145 – St. Thomas to Kansas City.
145 lifted at Dain City en-route, but after they re-routed to the Dundas 145 was cut back to just Dain City to Kansas City. Around that time or after dain city closed it was changed to 445 and became the NF transfer, which eventually became 369 (what CN still calls it today) and C93/whatever else they’ve called it over the years.
However, unless 145 was responsible for transfer to/from Fort Erie for CN interchange there must have been something else that did the interchange traffic to NF at the time. If anyone knows that is.. always curious to the NS operations of the 1997-8 period..
You are probably correct with 145 as I believe Kansas city was the destination I was thinking of. I’ll try to dig it up.
According to my NS 1995 review book the trains, at least on the NS were numbered 272/273 and ran between Welland and the CNW interchange at Chicago. These were “K” Line trains and ran as needed so there may have been another train assigned to Welland as well not to mention I did once shoot CN power in the yard there too.
Right – that 1995 book would have been written in 1994 so it is discussing what happened before the Cayuga was abandoned. Things changed quite a bit after it was abandoned, NS added a third eastbound train for a few months, then it settled into the pattern that stayed the same until 2006 as far as I can tell.
I can remember the frustration of being stuck at the crossing there by what seemed to be an endless Piggyback operation in Dain City, and then almost overnight… gone. A great capture !