Remember the phrase “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from one of those old war movies? Well fellow Hoosier Railfan, spent the morning of December 14, 2010, in Crawfordsville, watching CSX crews take down the remaining semaphores on the Monon Subdivision. Here’s his story from the North Central Indiana Railfan Yahoo Group.
Northbound J726 was the last train to physically pass through the “blades” although they were all out of service by the time he came through late morning; the last train to actually use the authority granted by the semaphores would have been the northbound Hoosier State, which went through Crawfordsville in darkness and miraculously got to Lafayette only four minutes late.
The salvage crew started at Ames and took the blade and southbound color light signal down, then moved north. They weren’t too kind to the northbound semaphore at Main Street; it came down blade first, which wadded up the blade and shattered the red lens. After that, the boom operator was told to be a bit more gentle, which he most definitely was with the southbound signal.
Once the crews had the signals on the ground, the crews cut the mast just below the blade and motor and loaded it onto a truck; for a brief second, as the boom operator was lifting the blade/motor/finial/cut mast up onto the truck it was eerily similar to all the grisly severed heads in “Apocalypse Now.” Not pleasant.
After watching the “Nightmare at Main Street” I had enough and headed east toward Indianapolis, back to work and the “modern world”. The salvage trucks were on their way to the north side of town as I left. But my last memory of “shorty,” the short semaphore up at the north end of Crawfordsville, will forever be of J726 easing through with a friendly honk and wave from the hogger. I’m glad I decided to keep it that way.
Long Live The Monon, Eric Powell