NS at Historic and Busy Bellevue

Railroad Town U. S. A.

There used to be many small cities and towns spread throughout the Midwest with that nickname. Today, with fewer manifest cars to be classified, fewer shops with modern diesels, and fewer crew change points with longer crew districts, many former railroad towns are now just pass through places, and some of these former railroad towns have even lost their railroad.

Not so with Bellevue in north central Ohio, southwest of Cleveland. A railroad town since the Nickel Plate arrived in 1882, today this small city with 8200 inhabitants is busier than ever. With the completion of the near doubling of size of their huge classification yard northeast of town in 2015, now known as Moorman Yard, Norfolk Southern in Bellevue is busier than ever. Five NS lines run into Bellevue plus the Wheeling and Lake Erie and there still is a locomotive shop there in addition to the eighty track classification yard. And there is even a railfan platform west of the yard near downtown Bellevue, thanks to the hard work of the nearby Mad River and NKP Museum and the Kemper family.

This program shows twenty-four hours of action at or near the Kemper Rail Park railfan platform on the lines to Fort Wayne, Columbus and Toledo in April of 2019.