Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

This channel has been posting a gold mine of stuff from the Wisconsin Central in the '90s.

This video has a rare close-up shot of the ex-C&NW WRRS wigwag at Van Dyne. Most railfans seemed to always shoot the MSCo cantilever wigwag on the parallel ex-Soo Line track, which made sense because it was on the south side of the crossing (better sun angle most of the time) and because those signals were quite rare in Wisconsin by that time since only Soo Line used them, while C&NW and Milwaukee Road both made heavy use of the WRRS harp-style or peach basket wigwag.

There's also an unusual combination of a WC SDL39 and an Amtrak F40 on a local freight, unpatched Conrail power, other classic crossing signals with mechanical bells, and some curious cows in the countryside of America's Dairyland. Oh, and there's also a CP train with an awesome EMD lash at Duplainville with a look at the Safetran pedestal gate signals that were there at the time.

That's one thing that I have to love about YouTube, it kinda serves as an easily accessible archive for videos of trains and crossings.

Neat stuff in that video as well. Think I've seen a video taken from the other side of that crossing with the wigwags.

Yeah, like I said there's quite a few videos out there now of the MSCo wigwag that was on the ex-Soo Line side of that crossing. Some even on that same channel, like this (footage starts at 5:25):



So much cool stuff was lost when WC acquired the Fox River Valley Railroad and with it, the ex-C&NW that ran parallel to their previous ex-Soo Line ROW from Fond du Lac up through to Neenah, and consolidated their Superior-Chicago mainline by abandoning parts of both corridors and connecting the rest. Then even WC's photogenic maroon and gold EMD power was lost to the CN era.

Its nice that someone filmed the time when amtrak leased F40s to freight railroads