from short line

FROM SHORT

LINE

www.TrainsMag.com 41

ENGINEER ALEX MOSS has Louisville & In-diana mixed freight train C12A rolling through southern Indiana at a steady 49 mph, bound for the railroad’s Jeff Yard in November 2016.

“This is exciting. It’s a really nice ride now,” he says. Less than three months prior, the same trip would have been an amble through the countryside with the speed

never reaching above 25 mph.The faster run is possible because

of the South Wind project, a com-plete revitalization of the Louisville

& Indiana Railroad short line, from dispatching to roadbed to rail. The project

is a key element in an agreement be-tween the short line and Class I railroad CSX Transportation to turn the line be-tween Louisville, Ky., and Indianapolis into a major artery for through traffic.

The South Wind name recalls the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Chicago-to-Flori-da fast streamliner launched in December 1940 that traveled this same route. But the South Wind project is very much about handling today’s freight traffic between the Midwest and Southeast and planning for the future. It’s about a shortline rail-road connecting its customers with the national rail network and at the same time hosting huge CSX automotive, intermod-al, and merchandise trains. But don’t ex-pect the daily presence of big Class I rail-road trains to change the focus. “We are a short line,” says Louisville & Indiana Pres-ident John Goldman. “We don’t want to be

anything other than a short line. But we’re very professional. We are very sensitive to our customers and to the communities we operate through.”

From his second-floor office in L&I’s headquarters in Jeffersonville, Ind., Gold-man has a good view of Jeff Yard with the skyline of Louisville in the background. The majority of L&I locomotives switching cars

Louisville & Indiana takes on a new role with CSXby Charles BuccolaPHOTOS BY STEVE SMEDLEY

TO SHORT CUT

Left, a local approaches Clagg Tower on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River bridge. Above, engineer Alex Moss.

42 Trains AUGUST 2017

below or lined up at the engine house sport a tasteful paint scheme of Tuscan Red with gold stripe, adopted in 2013. A keystone herald marks the locomotives, the head-quarters building, and other structures along the railroad. All are a conscious hom-age to the line’s PRR heritage.

The route’s ancestry starts with the Jef-fersonville Railroad, opened in 1850. Con-solidations with other pioneering lines during the mid-19th century resulted in a railroad reaching from the shore of the Ohio River to Indianapolis; the rail-road later became part of the Pennsy’s Panhan-dle Route.

With the opening of the Louisville Bridge over the Ohio River in 1870, the line anchored itself as an impor-tant connection between the

Midwest and South. In the late steam era, this busy line hosted multiple named pas-senger trains and heavy freights, the latter often powered by Pennsy’s J-1 2-10-4s. As with much of the PRR system, the property ultimately turned Conrail blue in 1976.

Conrail sold the line in 1991 because the tracks needed heavy, expensive repairs and the line wasn’t viewed as a route that would see traffic growth. Anacostia Rail Holdings, however, saw potential because this was the

only direct route between Indianapolis and Louisville,

it was close to multiple markets, and it had sites

for industrial develop-ment. In March 1994 Ana-

costia purchased the 106.5-mile main line and several

short branches. The Louis-ville & Indiana Railroad is one

of six railroads Anacostia

owns. Things got off to an inauspicious start when former Conrail employees declined to instruct the new guys how to lower the lift span of the Ohio River bridge. So L&I’s mo-tive power sat on the Kentucky side of the river until the next day, when the new crews cracked the code. The company got down to the business of moving overhead freight be-tween CSX in Louisville and Conrail in In-dianapolis, as well as servicing online busi-nesses and other interchange partners.

The model was set until the Conrail breakup in 1999. At that point, CSX routed traffic between Indianapolis and Louisville via Cincinnati over its own lines. Louisville & Indiana hung on without important overhead traffic, focusing on existing cus-tomers, adding new ones, and working

“WE DON’T

WANT TO BE

ANYTHING OTHER

THAN A

SHORT LINE.

A northbound Louisville & Indiana train between Jeffersonville, Ind., and Columbus, Ind., crosses Second Street in Seymour, Ind., at 12:20 a.m., on April 12, 2017.

Cincinnati

Whiteland

Southport

Edinburgh

Franklin

Columbus

Greenwood

Henryville

Underwood

Jonesville

Crothersville

Scottsburg

Austin

Seymour

Speed

Port of Indiana—Jeffersonville

Jeffersonville

Indianapolis

Muncie

Hamilton

Mitchell

Louisville

To Cleveland and Pittsburgh

Indianapolis

North Vernon

Bloomington

Connersville

N

© 2017 Kalmbach Publishing Co., TRAINS: Rick Johnson

0 50 milesScale

Watson

PAL CSX

CSX

CSX

CSXo/s

CSX

CSXLIRC

LIRC

LIRC

CSXCSX

CSX/NS

CSX/NS

CSX

NS

ISRR

INRD

NS

NS

SIND

MGR

Map area

I N D I A N A

I N D I A N A

O H I O

K E N T U C K Y

Ohio River

CSX to Chicago, NS to Lafayette, Ind.

To East St. Louis, Ill.

To Evansville, Ind.

To Newton, Ill.,and Chicago

To St. Louis andKansas City, Mo.

To Paducah, Ky. To Nashville, Tenn., and AtlantaTo Atlanta

To Cleveland and Toledo,Ohio

To Ft. Wayne, Ind.

LIRC Louisville & IndianaOther lines as indicatedCSX CSX TransportationINRD Indiana Rail RoadISRR Indiana SouthernMGR MG RailNS Norfolk SouthernPAL Paducah & LouisvilleSIND Southern IndianaNot all lines shown

Interchanges at Indianapolis,Seymour, and Louisville


steadily on improvements. But the lack of bridge traffic seemed like an odd and miss-ing essential ingredient.

KEY COMMODITIES AND CUSTOMERSIn addition to connecting with CSX, L&I

also interchanges with Norfolk Southern, Paducah & Louisville, and Indiana Rail Road. In the classic shortline mind-set of ex-cellent service to customers small and large, Goldman says, “All of our customers are sig-nificant to our business. We take great pride in getting that one-car customer and hope-fully growing with them.”

Of the diverse mix of traffic the company handles, the big commodities are steel, plas-tics, and grain. With these commodities, two locations figure prominently in the more than 20,000 carloads that Louisville & Indi-ana moved in 2016. One of them is Kokomo Grain at Edinburgh, which generated a re-cord 47 85-car unit grain trains in 2015 and

An R.J. Corman Rail Services crew installing new ties works to clear the main line of the Louisville & Indiana at Edinburgh, Ind., on April 10, 2017. The short line has seen extensive work to make it an important through route between Indianapolis and Louisville.


a robust 43 in 2016. The other is an industri-al park, rather than a single customer — the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville on the Ohio River. The port offers water, highway, and rail service to a dozen steel processors and 14 other companies that supply the automo-tive industry, Port Director Scott Stewart says. The Louisville & Indiana offers a com-petitive advantage to rail service, given all of its connections.

Steel and plastics are two commodities that go to the industrial park, automotive suppliers in the Louisville area, where pro-duction has been booming. This and the grain traffic helped L&I to avoid a traffic decline of the magnitude experienced by the Class I railroads in recent years.

A RESPONSIVE YOUNG TEAMGoldman describes his company as “a

small organization, a good corporate citizen, very customer focused.” Of course good cus-tomer service is the hallmark of successful short lines. But just how far is the company willing to go? A good example is Dutch Lane Yard in Jeffersonville, at one time a busy New York Central yard adjacent to a U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps depot. When Anacostia purchased the property, it was essentially abandoned. A customer,

Lubrizol, requested Louisville & Indiana to store plastic resin cars. The short line invest-ed several million dollars to restore the yard, reopened in March 2016, to meet that need. It can hold up to 80 cars from which the customer can transload product from rail to truck. The yard could be further expanded to serve other customers. “We are a young team, but we’re also an experienced team,” Goldman says, noting that most of the man-agement staff has experience on Class I rail-roads. With that background, he says he and his employees can foster working relation-

ships with Class I railroads. To an employee, you can sense the excitement among the Louisville & Indiana workforce about being part of something big: the South Wind proj-ect and its long-term effects.

JOINT-USE AGREEMENT Under the agreement with CSX, the Lou-

isville & Indiana is becoming a new railroad from the ground up. New 136-pound weld-ed rail is replacing jointed rail dating back to the 1930s, and it’s placed atop new ties set in new ballast. Bridges, culverts, and other sub-

Louisville & Indiana engineer Alex Moss switches cars with conductor Joe McKinley as they work Jeff Yard’s switcher J-11A, at Jeffersonville, Ind., on April 11, 2017.

Louisville & Indiana Railroad President John D. Goldman checks on the status of one of his trains from his second-floor office of the railroad’s headquarters building in Jeffersonville, Ind. In the foreground, a model of one of the railroad’s GP38-2s.


structure are rebuilt where necessary.The agreement is the latest step in the re-

lationship between Louisville & Indiana and CSX that began with traffic to the industrial park at the port. CSX reaches the industrial park via a remnant of the Baltimore & Ohio Nabb Branch. To reach it, at first CSX took a convoluted route around Louisville and southern Indiana. A 2000 agreement al-lowed CSX to cross Louisville & Indiana’s bridge and connect with the branch where it crossed the short line, saving CSX consider-able running time and allowing for aban-donment of the branch’s west end.

Arrangements between the two compa-nies evolved, and eventually CSX freights to or from Cincinnati or Indianapolis would occasionally run over the short line. This practice eventually reached the point where a trio of freights was routinely running over the Louisville & Indiana rather than taking CSX’s own longer and more difficult route between those cities.

On April 10, 2015, the Surface Transpor-tation Board approved an agreement be-tween Louisville & Indiana and CSX to up-grade the track from FRA Class 2 to FRA Class 4 standards to accommodate 286,000-pound cars, rebuild the Flat Rock River bridge in Columbus, Ind., and install a modern dispatching system. CSX agreed to pay $70 million to $90 million to make these improvements, as well as another $10 million to the short line for a “perpetual non-exclusive freight operating easement” to operate 13-15 daily overhead trains. Full implementation of the agreement is to be accomplished by 2022.

Why would CSX invest so much money in this short line? First, CSX characterizes Louisville as the heart of its automotive ser-vices network, but its route to Cincinnati, the LCL Subdivision, crosses tributaries of the Ohio River. That means multiple grades in both directions, many of them in excess of 1 percent. Curves abound, some as tight as 8 degrees, so speed isn’t possible. Sidings do not accommodate long trains operated today and lengthening them is not practical. So volume isn’t possible, either. Use of the Louisville & Indiana avoids the capacity-constrained LCL Sub and Queensgate Yard in Cincinnati, offering improved efficiencies in the Midwestern region, according to pub-lic filings with the Surface Transportation Board. Third, CSX can operate longer inter-modal trains than on the LCL.

Contrast this with Louisville & Indiana’s line, where the biggest grade is at the Ohio River bridge. With an essentially straight, flat path across largely rural Hoosier coun-tryside, trains can run for miles at track speed, and there’s space for lengthened sid-ings, too. A single crew can easily make the trip from Louisville to Indy or Cincinnati.

The first major phase of renovation was

IF YOU’RE A BRIDGE ROUTE, you ought to have a major bridge, right? And L&I has one that Bridge Operator Rodger Ritchie calls “the cornerstone of the L&I.” One mile long from abutment to abutment, the bridge spans the Falls of the Ohio, a series of rap-ids now submerged, that were once an obstacle to river traffic. A lift span rises over the Portland Canal, which channels barges through McAlpine Locks and Dam.

Although Ritchie says, “I like to keep the trains moving,” he and fellow operators in Clagg Tower, adjacent to bridge and canal, must keep a watchful eye on the river below. Linked into the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers systems for barge traffic navi-gating the Ohio River and using the locks, the operator must coordinate the raising and lowering of the lift span with both railroad and river traffic.

CSX has a historical connection to the bridge. Predecessor Louisville & Nashville and its officers made substantial investments in the Louisville Bridge Co., the business that built and owned the bridge. L&N General Superintendent Albert Fink designed the bridge and oversaw its construction. L&N’s 1866 annual report included the pre-diction that the bridge would greatly increase business in all directions.

From the onset of operations in 1870, trains of Pennsylvania Railroad predecessor Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis crossed to connect with the L&N in Louisville. For nearly two decades, the bridge provided strategic dominance to L&N; predecessors of the Baltimore & Ohio, Monon, and Southern were compelled to join the river cross-ing. PRR ultimately acquired L&N’s majority stock ownership in the bridge.

In 1916 construction was begun to replace the original iron bridge with a double- tracked steel structure, a lift span replacing the swing span over the Portland Canal. The January 1919 issue of Railway Age opined that the reconstruction project was “the foremost railway bridge project under way during the past year,” noting that it con-tained the longest riveted simple-truss span in the world, the 644-foot Indiana Chan-nel. With freight, passenger, and commuter traffic, and particularly because it essential-ly served as the yard lead for Pennsy’s cramped yard and roundhouse in Louisville, several hundred movements were made daily on the bridge.

In the late 1990s, Ritchie relates that when he came to work for L&I, the bridge op-erator was on duty only from noon to 2 p.m. to allow the L&I’s daily run to Louisville to scoot across the bridge and return. Today, Clagg Tower, which controls the bridge, is a 24/7 operation. As a key link in L&I, the short line has invested significantly in main-taining and upgrading the bridge structure, including the lift span. Clagg Tower got an exterior makeover in September 2016. More important, inside the tower, 1930s-era re-lays were replaced by modern electronics, making movement of the span a reliable push-button operation. The bridge turns 100 years old in 2019, and it is a river cross-ing ready for many more years of use. — Charles Buccola

THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGE

CSX automotive train Q272 crosses Louisville & Indiana’s Ohio River bridge. The 10,167-foot-long train is bound from Louisville to Wallbridge, Ohio. Charles Buccola


completed in fall 2016 with the 53-mile Louisville-to-Seymour, Ind., segment of the line made ready for heavier cars, more fre-quency of service, and higher speeds.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING 286While the collaboration is important to

both railroads, the golden ring is the 286,000-pound cars that allow the railroad to better serve existing customers and to at-tract new business. “The 286 capability, the industry standard, is more important for us than the speed,” Goldman says. “It has been a handicap to some of our customers” to be limited to 263,000 pounds. Whether the customer was receiving or shipping product, the business at the other end might want to deal only with cars fully loaded to 286,000 pounds. The reason, of course, is simple eco-nomics. “If you are using fewer cars, you are paying less,” Goldman says. There had been occasions when a prospective customer lost interest due to the weight limit. Now those opportunities are back on the table.

The importance of the heavier loads is echoed on the customer side. Phil Gorrell, manager of Kokomo Grain’s Edinburgh fa-cility, says the ability to use heavier cars will make the company more competitive. In past years, outbound Kokomo Grain unit

trains were limited to 263,000 pounds per car. Stewart, at the port industrial park, like-wise considers the heavier car loadings im-portant to keeping the Louisville area a competitive industrial hub.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTAs to the company’s role as a good cor-

porate citizen and its sensitivity to on-line communities, the railroad’s actions bear out these philosophies. As soon as the agreement was approved between L&I and CSX, shortline officials visited on-line com-

munity leaders to brief them on the con-struction plans and increased train fre-quency. Signs were added to every road crossing, informing the public of increased traffic and train speed. Announcements went out to local newspapers and TV sta-tions. Not satisfied just to do the mini-mum, L&I’s team continues to meet with mayors, county commissioners, and other groups to keep them informed about the changes. And that’s not all. They also re-turn calls from ordinary citizens.

L&I Director of Transportation Jeremy

Louisville & Indiana Railroad Customer Service Manager Leah Windell smiles as a northbound CSXT run-through, train Q502, rolls past a yard job outside her window in the shortline railroad’s headquarters building at Jeffersonville, Ind.

As a heavy rain falls, a Louisville & Indiana two-unit Jeff Yard job works the rebuilt yard tracks at Jeffersonville, Ind., on April 11, 2017.


Kramer, a qualified Operation Lifesaver pre-senter, has met with police, fire depart-ments, schools, and others to talk about safety. In September 2016, Louisville & Indi-ana used CSX’s Safety Train to familiarize first responders on how to deal with emer-gency situations on a railroad. The train spent time at both Columbus and Jefferson-ville, serving both ends of the railroad. L&I extended the invitation to emergency per-sonnel from neighboring counties, since they may be called upon to back up the on-line communities.

The railroad works to hire veterans, and it has met its goal for 25 percent of its 47 employees to have served. Even though it’s a small organization, the railroad has estab-lished relationships with nine local charities to which the company and employees con-tribute regularly. In an unusual outreach, the railroad funded equipment for the Austin, Ind., police department.

OPERATIONS ON THE RAILROAD “L&I dispatcher, this is CSXT Y220 and

we need an EC-1.” Whether it’s a CSX or Louisville & Indiana train, it will be operat-ing under a track warrant issued by the shortline dispatcher. The Louisville & Indi-ana-CSX agreement called for a modern dispatching system, and that was just fine with Goldman: It was one of his goals when he arrived at the railroad in 2012. In the course of discussions between the compa-nies, CSX suggested that L&I use the system the Class I uses. So in November 2015, the short line’s dispatchers moved into a new building with this state of the art system, which offers another benefit: CSX has visi-bility into the system for current status of trains so the big railroad can anticipate when its trains will return to its lines.

With the installation of welded rail com-pleted to Seymour, track speeds were in-creased to 49 mph in 10-mph steps, starting in September 2016. At the same time, CSX started shifting trains to the route. Adding trains gradually allowed L&I dispatchers, operating personnel, and line-side commu-nities to adjust to construction, increased train frequency, and higher speeds. Direc-tional running (northbound) also helped with the flow and has been a plus over on CSX’s LCL Sub, as well.

Louisville & Indiana’s train crews have two on-duty locations — Jef-fersonville and Columbus. At the latter, one job is the Columbus local. The other is a train that goes to Indianapolis five days a week to interchange cars with Indiana Rail Road. In a new arrangement begun in April 2017, Indiana Rail Road handles Louisville & Indiana’s

cars to and from CSX’s Avon Yard. Formerly a three-day-a-week job to Indy, the change was made to offer better customer service. Jeffersonville has three core jobs, one of which handles Jeff Yard switching. Another job serves the Port of Indiana, Jeffersonville customers, and the Louisville interchanges with Paducah & Louisville and NS. The third job serves the Indiana towns of Speed, Scottsburg, and Seymour. Extras, such as grain trains, are run as needed.

From September 2016 to February 2017, a daily average of five CSX through trains operated over the L&I, predominantly au-tomotive. Springtime brought regular in-termodal service to the line in the form of CSX Q142, which also carries a half-dozen Tropicana reefers. Although several more CSX trains could fit in, CSX and L&I oper-ations people are mindful of the work win-dows for the ongoing track construction in planning for the seven train symbols that show up on any given day. CSX trains en-ter the Louisville & Indiana at 11th Street in Louisville, adjacent to Union Station. Those bound for Cincinnati turn east at Seymour to take the Indiana Sub, a former Baltimore & Ohio line. At Cincinnati, they can enter Queensgate or proceed directly north through Ohio. Trains destined to In-dianapolis run the length of the short line,

from which they can go either east or west on CSX

tracks to their end-point destination.

BUT WAIT!

THERE’S MOREThe timing of future up-

grades is in CSX hands with recommendations from L&I.

Recognizing the benefit of

improvements completed between Louis-ville and Seymour, CSX accelerated fund-ing to install welded rail to Milepost 4 in Indianapolis, at the northern end of the railroad, by August 2017. With preparato-ry work completed, contractors started laying newly rolled rail northward from Seymour in April. After the Steel Dynam-ics Inc. rail is laid, speed limits will be in-creased to 49 mph between Seymour and Indianapolis. But 286,000-pound cars won’t be allowed on the segment until the Flat Rock River bridge is replaced, proba-bly in 2018. Aside from culvert and drain-age work, the remaining major project would be new 14,000-foot sidings near Scottsburg and Edinburgh. The sidings would make bidirectional operation of CSX trains possible, since their trains could meet. These projects are yet to be scheduled, but Goldman believes that CSX will want to push them forward.

Not part of the core project per se, an improvement under consideration by L&I is the restoration of double track on the Ohio River Bridge. To power its trains, L&I ac-quired a pair of six-axle units in April. They will be added to the roster and may replace two GP38-3s. L&I is working to add several prospective on-line customers. In a welcome development, a Fortune 500 steel processor, POSCO, announced that it will be locating at the port, adding more traffic in the area. So even more change is in the wind.

Working with CSX in the South Wind project, the Louisville & Indiana has rein-vented itself as a Midwestern thorough-fare. “The way the operations are changing on this railroad,” Goldman says, “the vol-ume and everything we’re going to be put-ting on here will exceed the Pennsylvania Railroad days.” 2

“THE VOLUME AND EVERYTHING

WE’RE GOING TO BE PUTTING ON HERE WILL EXCEED THE PENNSYLVANIA

RAILROAD DAYS.”

Louisville & Indiana GP39-2 No. 2303, a former Missouri-Kansas-Texas unit, rolls a 62- car train southward at Henryville, Ind. The train is running at 49 mph, the new maximum speed for the rebuilt line that’s become a Class I railroad short cut in the Midwest.

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