19-10-04 PHOTOS: Homewood Jct

The town of Homewood, PA sounds like it has some association with the steel mills in the Monongahela valley or perhaps the neighborhood in Pittsburgh. In actuality Homewood and its Junction is west of Pittsburgh in the Beaver River valley at the point where the PRR Fort Wayne line strikes out westward from the valley to make its way overland to Alliance, OH and points beyond. To avoid confusion with CP-HOME on the Pittsburgh Line, the interlocking at Homewood Jct was designated CP-WOOD and consisted of a full crossover and the connection to the Koppel Secondary track which continues up the valley, eventually joining with the former Conrail Youngstown Line. CP-WOOD was last rebuilt in he mid 1990's along with the Fort Wayne Line cab signal project, retaining its PRR position lights and with all of the re-signaling going about I scheduled a visit in conjunction with my October 2019 trip to the Pittsburgh area. Ultimately, all my attempts at signal documentation would be thwarted, but I did manage to capture a reasonable amount of NS freight action. You can find the full set of photos here (mirror).

Arriving at the location of CP-WOOD, I discovered that the interlocking hadn't just been re-signaled, it had been removed and relocated as the amount of traffic on the Koppel secondary did not justify the annoying of maintaining main line crossovers on a curve. The junction part of Homewood Junction had been reduced to a hand operated switch on track #2 with a station sign referencing the adjacent Buttermilk Falls.

The old crossovers had been dumped in the weeds next to a new cab signal indication change point situated 34.4 miles from the east end of the Fort Wayne Bridge in downtown Pittsburgh.

The loss of the adjacent interlocking had already affected property values in the town, with railfan housing abandoned and falling into disrepair.

The junction with the Koppel Secondary was in the form of a wye track, but the north leg had connected to track 2 via a hand throw switch since the 1990's rebuild. Note the width of the right of way which used to support 4 tracks as part of the PRR's New York to Chicago "Broad Way".

Consulting the overhead on Google Maps, the most likely location for the new CP-WOOD was on a stretch of track west of town and I proceeded to the Foxdale Road crossing where I caught the first doublestack intermodal train I would encounter that morning led by NS C40-10W #7521 and AC44C6M #4139.

The new cantilever signals at CP-WOOD needed extra wide arms to span the double width RoW.

A second intermodal train soon showed up, led by NS C44-9W #9551, crossing over from track 1 to track 2.

Driving to the other end of the interlocking, a Clear signal on track #1 indicated the impending arrival of yet another eastbound intermodal train, this one lef by ET44AC #3659 and AC44C6M #4190 running elephant style.

Although the eastbound on track #1 had passed, the signal on track #2 was now displaying Clear.

It wouldn't be long before the 4th intermodal train in a row rounded the curve with AC44C6M #4262 in the lead and SC70ACU #7325 running behind.

While waiting around for more NS freights I managed to get a picture of this birb.

Although the light was great, there was nothing pulled up on the signals and I decided to call it a morning. Here is a Conrail era cab signal indication point marked at Milepost 36.4 right past the Aley Hill Rd crossing.

Still hoping to photo some Fort Wayne Line signals between Pittsburgh and Leetsdale, I unfortunately arrived just a week or so too late and was met by the dreaded cab signal indication point hut at the west end of the Island Ave Yard.

The yard was empty except for a smattering of MoW equipment and ex-Conrail N7D caboose #21132.

CP-ISLE on the Ohio Connecting Railroad bridge had also been replaced.

That's all for now. Next time I take a ride on the Staten Island Railway.