December 30th, 2005
We slept in Schenectady, New York on our way home, hoping to wake up to find some Deleware and Hudson (CP) trains in the area. We did find one, parked inaccessibly in the distance. We found the overpass of the CSX and the D&H trackage at South Schenectady, shooting one manifest freight at a nearby grade crossing on the CSX. We then proceeded along our main goal of getting home, stopping at Utica to see (kind of) the NYSW and at Geneva to see the Finger Lakes Railway before stopping at Lyons to see some CSX trains before hitting the road as bad weather rolled in. On our way to Geneva, we passed a Finger Lakes train going the other way through Woodstock, New York, and pursued it West to nearby Seneca Falls. Its EOT sounds different from most and broadcasts on 160.205, so we didn't recognise it until we saw the train pass. CSX, for its part, mostly gave us intermodal trains with big GEs for power, reminding me somewhat eerily of CP! This concluded are 2 week travelling adventure ostensibly to see family for the holidays.
Lyons, New York
(map) Lyons is a few miles South of Geneva, New York, linked by an NS track from the town's ex-Conrail CSX main line to the Finger Lakes Railway.
video
2 big GEs lead a CSX intermodal through the yard at Lyons.
video
An Amtrak train heads East through Lyons.
video
Another CSX intermodal heads West.
June 29th, 2008
We started our day out in Medina, scoping the Falls Road toward Lockport to chase a winery excursion train back to Medina. From there we caught CSX Q364 at the small town of Corfu and went off to the other side of Rochester to check out the OMID at Sodus. Finding nothing there, we headed up to Lyons until we got rained out and headed to Henrietta for the night. At our hotel, we looked up the address of the Rochester and Genesee Valley Railroad Museum which Laura had found in the Rochester Visitors' Guide earlier in the day. We went off in the evening to see if we could find them, hours after their scheduled closure. We found the museum and started photographing the equipment parked out front. Moments later, LV 211, the museum's RS-3M, came down a hill and the crew were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Checking that museum out definitely paid off.
video
A CSX intermodal passes eastbound through Lyons.
video
AMTK #64 heads east.
video
CSXT Q112 passes through Lyons.
video
CSXT Q114 passes through Lyons.
video
CSXT Q364 heads east.
video
A westbound CSX manifest heads for Rochester.
February 17th, 2009
We left Brattleboro on the morning of the 16th and went to NMH, where I caught up with some of my old teachers and classmates for most of the day. In the late afternoon, we cut across Mass. to the Hoosac tunnel in Florida, but the Guilford gods did not love us and no trains were forthcoming, although a local railfan reported a Bow coal empty was supposed to be on its way. We slept in Utica that night and on the 17th we started the day there, shooting the Mohawk, Adirondack, and Western and an NYSW unit from afar that came in by surprise. We chased the MHWA to Rome, where we followed the wrong spur and took a while to find it out in the industrial park on the east side of town. From there we chased CSX Q091, the ultra-high priority vegetable train to Lyons, catching it only once at Syracuse yard, and there only barely. From Lyons, where we missed Q091 by about 7 minutes, we headed up to Geneva to see what we could find on the FGLK, and chased the Lyons job back to Lyons before heading out to the Rochester and Genessee Valley Railroad Museum south of Rochester and finally completing our trip by getting back to Guelph a few minutes past 10pm.
video
CSXT Q157 heads through Lyons.
video
FGLK's Lyons job passes through a field on its way to Lyons a mile or so north of I-90.
May 8th, 2009
On our way to the wedding of one of my oldest friends in rural New Hampshire, we stopped in to see the Ontario Midland, CSX, HRRC, and PVRR, finding very little running. We brought our camera in for a cleaning, and it was returned to us without charge because of an apparently immutable piece of dirt on the sensor, so another railfan trip goes into the record with a great big spot in the upper-right corner of all my photos.
