pablo wrote:There used to be a mountain of flangers and plows there, within the last four years or so. Can I assume that those have been moved?
Olean's yard is nice for a variety of reasons, but in case no one has mentioned it, here's another one: Conrail or NS went through with a magnet and picked up all of the crap that was laying around, and so you won't (or, at least, you didn't) see spikes and other railroad-related garbage around as a hazard when walking.
Dave Becker
The Olean yard also benefits from being somewhat new... at least in railroad terms...
The old yard was an absolute mess.
There were two multiple track classification areas, basically end to end.
I'm assuming after the abandoment of the Oil City and Rochester lines the end nearest St. Bonaventure University was just left unused.
Back around 1978 I took a walk through the abandon yard area and trees were growing up through the tracks and in one area a business had pushed a road right through the abandon yard at a 90 degree angle to the tracks taking away rails for several yards on either side. Sorta funny. You had tracks on one side of you, this road cutting right through the yard and then the tracks continuing on the other side of you.
At that point I'm guessing this old yard was about 8 tracks wide. One interesting thing was that the scales were still sorta present in this old section of the yard even though it was apparent that they had not seen service in many, many years.