Eastern Trunk Lines in Northwest Ohio, CSX

For over one hundred years four separate railroads competed for passenger and freight traffic between the New York City metropolitan area and Chicago – the New York Central, Pennsylvania, Erie, and Baltimore and Ohio. Collectively these lines were known as the Eastern Trunk Lines or just Trunk Lines for short. The term Trunk Lines essentially disappeared shortly after the passage of the Staggers Act in the fall of 1980 that legalized private contracts between railroads and shippers. The rate bureaus set up by the Interstate Commerce Commission including the Trunk Lines Tariff Bureau were no longer needed. Today there are only two Eastern Trunk Lines left – CSX and Norfolk Southern. This program shows over twenty-four hours of action in April of 2014 on one of these – the former Baltimore and Ohio, now CSX Chicago Line, mostly in northwest Ohio on their Garrett Subdivision, with a few trains filmed just across the border in Indiana. This is at a time when trains were having a difficult time getting through Chicago in part because BNSF was in a major meltdown and wasn’t always accepting trains. CSX itself wasn’t doing much better with the Garrett Subdivision both sides of Garrett a parking lot for trains waiting to be re-crewed. CSX put fourteen empty coal hoppers on the ground at Saint Joe, Indiana four days before we began our shooting and this didn’t help the congestion on the CSX Chicago Line either. With nearly every class I railroad having congestion issues and short on power, the head end of trains on the Garrett Sub during our visit was as colorful as it has ever been with begged and borrowed foreign power on many of the trains.