Making its much anticipated daylight trek across Ohio, NS 66T 19 and its 14,000 ton, 100 cans of liquid black crude for Reybold, DE split the Pennsy style PC194.7 intermediates at North Robinson on the CF&E and western edge of the Fort Wayne Line. The leader is one of five EMD SD70ACu locomotives Canadian Pacific chose to receive a unique commemorative military paint scheme that honors both the Canadian and U.S. armed forces. This particular one, CP 6644, is painted in Royal Canadian Air Force Dark Green and Ocean Gray colors featuring a design similar to that of Britain's Supermarine Spitfire propped fighter plane used during World War II. Black and white vertical stripes on the long hood end are "invasion stripes" which were applied to Allied aircraft prior to the famous D-Day landings. Also, the locomotive's engine numbers use Royal Canadian Air Force font and the No. 6644 was picked to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which took place on June 6th of 1944. This train coupled with the holiday Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day was enough to bring nearly 30 people, including me, out for the chase of this thing south of Bellevue on the Sandusky District and east on the old PRR. Delays would be soon encountered as this train would hold to the east at Crestline for nearly an hour waiting for small maintenance window to lift following the discovery of a broken rail by NS 12V earlier that morning.
What was once Pennsylvania Railroad's busy high speed Pittsburgh to Chicago triple main, the Fort Wayne Line west of Alliance is now only a secondary route on Norfolk Southern's vast system with much of the western portion belonging to G&W's Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern who has since reduced it to single track and downgraded the line to "dark" territory, aside from a small signaled portion between Bucyrus and Crestline. For the longest time, this route didn’t have much of positive and foreseeable future. As the years went on, coal traffic from Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, which seemed to really be the only form of traffic on his line, dried up significantly and it looked as though NS would cease operations altogether on it. However, the relatively new process of hydraulic fracking saw BNSF and Canadian class 1 giants CP and CN sign agreements to haul crude oil between the fields of North Dakota and western Canada to the refineries of United States' east coast. With all this new influx of traffic flooding into the Chicago area for interchange, NS began to route these trains via Fort Wayne and down the Pennsy to alleviate congestion on the old NYC double-tracked "Water Level Route," now the Chicago Line/Cleveland Line. Along with daily manifest trains 12V and 15V and the occasional coal move, these oil trains have since given new life to this once vast stretch of railroad and traffic levels are predicted to keep on the rise in the years to come.
