Eastern Trunk Lines in Northwest Ohio, Norfolk Southern

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. 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 New York Central and Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, now part of NS’s Chicago Line, in northwest Ohio between the outskirts of Toledo and Oak Harbor, twenty-three miles east of Toledo.

At Oak Harbor NS’s Bellevue to Toledo line passes overhead with some trains getting onto or off of the Chicago Line there through a new connection opened right after the Conrail split. 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. NS had some congestion around their system at this time, especially further west when trains got close to Chicago.