road trip 2000 pt1

Geneva State Park, Jefferson and the AC&J Railroad - 2000

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Geneva State Park, Ohio

First night out; Geneva State Park is located on the shore of Lake Erie east of Cleveland. The land is mostly level and sandy with low vegetation and some forested areas, and mosquitoes thrive here. In the evening, I biked down to the beach with the notion of going for a swim. The no-see-ums almost ate me alive.

Sound travels great distances over water. I kept hearing a dull booming, like strip-mine or quarry blasting. When a storm arrived hours later, I realized that I had been hearing a thunder when it was still more than a hundred miles away.

In the morning the surface of the lake was still stirred up by the previous night's storm. Near the beach lay a tree felled some time before by erosion, the stump and roots polished by the action of waves and sand.

Jefferson, Ohio - Ashtabula Carson & Jefferson RR

The 1872 Lake Shore & Michigan Southern depot at Jefferson, Ohio was derelict and facing imminent destruction when the local garden club took it on as a restoration project. It now contains museum exhibits.

On land adjacent to the depot, the historic preservation group has relocated an 1849 church and a barn from the 1890s. There's also a one-room school in early stages of restoration, and the group has acquired a general store that they plan to move to the site.

The Ashtabula Carson & Jefferson Railroad is a common-carrier short line that moves 750 – 1,200 carloads of freight annually and runs tourist trains behind a 1948 Alco S2 locomotive of former Erie Railroad provenance. The locomotive still has its original prime mover. It's smoky (what early Alco isn't?) and wheezy, an historic gem. It still wears its 1976 Bicentennial paint scheme. The train is made up of an Erie heavyweight passenger car, two Long Island Railroad commuter cars, a power car and a caboose. The pretty one-hour ride through mostly-undeveloped marsh and forested wetland passes over a former Lake Shore and Michigan Southern high-grade passenger line built in 1872.