Attended a road specific meet of the DT&I, once owned by Henry Ford, in the
small town of Washington Court House, Ohio yesterday. These informal fan meets with their walking tours have always been interesting to me, scaring up
obscure RR history They did a walk around rail sites in town finishing at a small city park with a C&O Kanawha under cosmetic restoration (another loco in a park I didn't know was there).
A caboose and telephone shack are also displayed. I found out WCH had had
a creosoting plant. I have been trying to find plans/photos of one as a destination for shipments from small saw mills. Can't find much on the net as
EPA has cleaned up most of these sites.
Two years ago the DT&I tour covered the "grasshopper", a lurching narrow gauge line supposed to run from Columbus to Cincinnati, but didn't reach either, branching off the DT&I at Jeffersonville, Ohio. Several structures from that line still stand, including a grain elevator seemingly standing in the middle of a field for no reason, and stone bridge abutments in the stream of the small town that sent the youngest combatant off to the Civil War.
Aside from being once owned by Henry Ford, the DT&I ran Russian decapods and gas elecrtics, one of which Henry's son Edsel (yes, the car) managed to
run into something and damage. If it had just bridged the Ohio, it might have
become a major road and met Henry's goal of tapping Kentucky and W. Virginia
coal fields.
