Photos by Jim Boyd
DT&I’s surprising south end was an easy-going back country Ohio branch line
“T
he name ‘Ironton’ always used to conjure up visions of a huge industrial city whose night skies
were forever illuminated by the glow of blast furnaces and Bessemer Convert- ers. The name Detroit, Toledo & Ironton thus implied a multiple-track carrier of ore trains, coal drags and urgent mer- chandise manifests. After all, any rail- road going to Ironton would have to live up to the name. “Names can be deceiving. Although it
still has one coke plant out on the east end of town, Ironton’s chief contribution to the tri-state area of the Ohio River valley stems from the fact that Ohio’s liquor laws are more liberal than those of Kentucky or West Virginia. The main line of the Norfolk & Western blasts through the middle of town, but the highballing coal trains and manifests ac- knowledge Ironton with little more than a few bleats on the air horn. The DT&I enters town like a streetcar by running down the middle of — you guessed it — Railroad Street. The DT&I freight house no longer serves its intended function, and the tracks pass by it, cross the N&W, and slide alongside the main line to a small and featureless interchange yard. This is quite a contrast to Chesapeake & Ohio’s huge Russell Yard complex just across the river, and those steel mills you expected to find in Ironton are also across the river in Ashland, Ky. “What Ironton lacks as an industri- al complex it makes up for by being
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a picturesque residential river town, and what the DT&I lacks as a heavy- duty main line it makes up for by being a very photogenic hill country branch. The DT&I between Detroit and Spring- field, Ohio, is the heavy-duty industrial bridge line that the name implies, but the traffic begins to dwindle down south of Springfield. Interchanges with N&W and C&O near Waverly pretty well mark the limits of bridge traffic, but DT&I’s ‘main line’ continues on down to Jackson, Ohio, the site of the road’s main car re- pair shops. Jackson has a modest freight yard and enough local industries to keep one afternoon switch job busy. . .” So began editor Jim Boyd’s tale of chasing Job 90, the local train assigned to the southern end of the DT&I from Jackson to Ironton, Ohio. RAILFAN mag- azine was barely a year old, and still on a quarterly schedule when this article appeared in the Spring 1975 issue. The majority of photos accompanying
the article were shot in 1969, with subsequent images taken in 1974. The operation had not changed much, though the first generation Geeps had been replaced by modern GP38s and GP40s, and independence had given way to control by the Grand Trunk. Branchline operations like these were
a common throwback to the steam era, yet were not as widely publicized as the heavy mainline action of the day. Infrequent schedules and a simple lack of communication meant colorful
operations like the Ironton Run toiled in relative obscurity. Boyd brought the twisting back roads of southern Ohio to life, explaining the train crew’s routine and best strategies for capturing the action. As a result, a new generation of railfans was encouraged to follow suit, no doubt. The DT&I was operated as an inde- pendent subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1929 until 1970, when it was sold off following the bankruptcy of Penn Central. The DT&I was acquired by Grand Trunk Western in 1980, which promptly abandoned the south end of the railroad past Washington Court House, Ohio, including the picturesque Ironton Run. —OTTO M. VONDRAK
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