A Good Day of Railfanning in Fostoria, Ohio (Well, Except for the Rain).

Hello everyone, and welcome to another video from the great railroad town of Fostoria, Ohio. Today's video covers my second late-summer adventure up to the Iron Triangle Railpark, and it turned into a pretty good day of railfanning, minus the rain in the afternoon. Aside from that, I had a grand old time railfanning in Fostoria. Today was the busiest and best day of action I've had in a long time, perhaps the best day of railfanning in over two years. In about 5 hours of railfanning between 10:30 and 3:30, I saw 17 trains. The high volume of trains on this day is attributed to both increasing numbers of autorack traffic and to CSX's recent changes to train operations around Fostoria. While train traffic is slowly increasing as a whole in Fostoria, CSX has added two "new" trains (Q508 and Q509) while eliminating two trains (Q150 and Q151). Q150 and Q151, the two former daily intermodal trains which ran between Detroit and North Baltimore, Ohio, have been combined with manifest trains Q508 and Q509 which run between Cincinnati and Detroit. While Q508 and Q509 are by no means "new" trains, they have been re-routed through Fostoria to run via the Willard and Pemberville Subdivisions. In years past, Q508 and Q509 ran through Deshler via the Toledo Subdivision. That said, thanks to precision-scheduled railroading and the economic shutdown, the four trains were combined into two as the "new" Q508 and Q509. It picks up and drops off the intermodal consist down in North Baltimore and runs as a manifest-only train west of North Baltimore. Aside from this small change, traffic has remained pretty much the same as the other times I've been up to Fostoria. Norfolk Southern continues to run their steel trains and their two new intermodal trains (20T and 21T) in addition to all the normal traffic one can expect from Norfolk Southern here in Fostoria. Another thing many of you may have noticed is an increase in the "land-barges" for CSX. While these types of trains are most commonly seen out west on Canadian National, Union Pacific, and BNSF, CSX this past summer has begun experimenting with their own land-barges. Contrary to their western Class I-railroad counterparts, CSX only uses an average of 2 to 3 engines per land-barge as opposed to the 6 or more engines Union Pacific or BNSF would use for their land-barges. Fortunately, these land-barges haven't negatively affected traffic here in Fostoria as train traffic for CSX continues to remain at expected levels. The best catch of the day I'd have to say was the "zipper-meet" between Q507 manifest train and the autorack train in the middle of the day. Even for a place like Fostoria, "zipper-meets" are not that common but they're always amazing to catch. For those unfamiliar with the term, "zipper-meet" is when two trains when switching subdivisions meet on the same subdivision, and when viewed side-by-side, the two trains look like they're forming a zipper. Pretty cool. Other noteworthy catches of this day of railfanning were the coal train heading on full speed down the Pemberville Subdivision and the Norfolk Southern manifest in the rain. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoy the video! -N&W475