This is a story of friendship and time travel. Recently, Kevin Scanlon (one of my best friends) and I decided to attend the Center for Railroad Photography &Art (CRP&A) conference at Lake Forest College in Illinois. We’ve done this six times before and usually drive west on a route that avoids interstates for as long as we can. Our journey normally takes us up to Cleveland, then along the lake as far as we can go. It’s an easy drive and Kevin always fills his iPhone with incredible and insanely varied music.

This year, we had planned a visit to an auto plant for a tour but found that they don’t do that on Thursdays. What to do? Well, back to that original route via Cleveland! Kevin offered to drive, and we arrived in Cleveland mid-morning. We are both industrial geeks and the big steel mill (actually two mills now merged into one) along the Cuyahoga River is always a draw for us.

Being that he was much more familiar than I with the area, I let Kevin navigate. He suggested a side road behind an old roundhouse, and we found a quiet place to pull over—and all at once, I’m fifty years back into the past. Let me set the scene—a long straightaway with three tracks stretching into the distance and at the end, looming beyond are two massive blast furnaces. As a kid in Pittsburgh, I grew up with steel plants all around and blast furnaces were THE symbol of those mills. There are only two active in the area (two still sleep in a museum nearby) and the living ones are both buried deep in a facility. All but two of these furnaces are gone in my town now and these are both buried deep in a plant. Used to be that you could see them all over the surrounding area, but they are long gone. Here I stand, stunned to see two of these big beasts right in front of me again—those years just fall away and I’m jabbering like a teenager at the sight (I’m sure Kevin was quite amused at my craziness).

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Once again, the years disappear and I’m back in the 70’s

We spent the next hour or so reveling in the sights and sounds of big steel—Cleveland Cliffs is running flat out and even rebuilding one of those blast furnaces, no mean feat in 2022. I had a good tour guide, who didn’t mind having a totally wound-up maniac sitting next to him, and who got us all around the plant allowing for a good long look at big steel still doing its thing.

Later in the day, we had a more somber visit at the now mothballed US Steel/Republic Lorain (Ohio) facility. Under cloudy skies, two blast furnaces stood cold and dead. They’ve been sleeping for over a decade and most likely will never pump out molten iron again. Again, this took me back to my past—steel slowly died in the Pittsburgh area during the 80’s and never came back.

The next morning brought another echo of the past. We stumbled into Michigan City, Indiana to look over the South Shore and see what they’d done to the street running (crews were already tearing up the street) and ended up at the shop east of town. Sitting on the eastbound main, we found a pair of GP38s with their APUs purring away under the hood keeping them warm. Soon enough, a crewman came out, unlocked the cabs, and started each one up. “This will make a nice little movie.”, Kevin observed and pulled out the trusty iPhone. We both noted how nice and smooth they started up after a night of sleep —it was great to hear the soft rumble of those Roots blown 645s. Once again, the years disappear and I’m back in the 70’s watching as Penn Central is invaded by GP38s—they were bright and shiny and new in a sea of dingy black power. Back then the GP38s were everywhere in town on the local railroads handling all the industrial switching. Most moved on as industry died out and nowadays the sound of non turbo EMDs is a rarity on NS and CSX. It was nice to chase these two orange girls and listen as they ran a local east on the interurban South Shore line.

Sitting with another good friend, Jim Ruffing, that night at the conference we (of course) reminisced about the old times. Kevin reminded me about when we’d met. I’d forgotten the exact circumstances, but he reminded me that we’d both tried to check the same railroad books from the school library when we were freshmen in 71-72. After that, we both ended up joining the local model railroad club and met Jim there right after. So began a great friendship that endures to this very day.

Damn, 50 years gone.

Kevin N. Tomasic – Photographs and text Copyright 2022