The former Pennsylvania Railroad and Conrail, now Norfolk Southern Columbia and Port Deposit Branch, a.k.a. The Port Road, between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Perryville, Maryland on the Northeast Corridor is an engineering marvel as it follows the beautiful yet remote Susquehanna River to its mouth on Chesapeake Bay. Now owned by Norfolk Southern, this line serves as NS’s route to Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, and Delaware’s Eastern Shore from the rest of the far flung NS system. In the past two years crude oil trains from North Dakota bound for the PBF Energy Partners refinery in Delaware City, Delaware near Wilmington, have begun invading this line in earnest, raising the train count on the Port Road to levels not seen since the closing of Potomac Yard south of Washington, D. C. For two decades this line was almost entirely a nighttime railroad as Amtrak rarely allowed daytime trains on their congested Northeast Corridor which Conrail and NS trains had to utilize to get to Wilmington, Delaware or Baltimore. Recently Amtrak began allowing two or three trains a day onto the NEC, usually coal or the ever expanding crude oil trains, opening up the Port Road to daytime photography. This program shows a day and a half of continuous operations plus a third day of action on Norfolk Southern’s Port Road Branch between the outskirts of Columbia, Pennsylvania and Perryville in May of 2014. "Norfolk Southern's Port Road" is one hour and 23 minutes in length. This DVD can be watched with or without narration.

For nearly 100 years the Missouri Pacific and the Southern Pacific’s Cotton Belt subsidiary competed for business between the St. Louis gateway and the Southwest, sharing each other’s track between East St. Louis and Dexter, Missouri. Today, Union Pacific owns both lines and traffic has begun growing again after dropping during the great recession, spurred on by unit trains of crude oil headed to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Trains are getting longer and heavier with some having radio controlled distributed power fore and aft. Foreign power abounds as UP and its eastern connections pool power on many trains. In addition BNSF has overhead rights on this line to East St. Louis. This program shows all the trains in October of 2013 for over twenty-four hours on the critical single track portion of UP’s Chester Subdivision south of East St. Louis between Illmo on the Mississippi River and Dexter in southeast Missouri. Dexter is where the lines divide and directional running to Texas begins. The traffic on this line is extremely varied with manifests toting chemicals from the Gulf Coast, trains carrying autos and auto parts for auto distribution centers and assembly plants in Texas and Mexico, the Texas and Mexico intermodal fleet to and from Chicago, and many types of unit trains clogging this single track section as you will see. This is the same stretch of track covered nineteen years ago in our program titled “River Wars I – the Mississippi River”. "Union Pacific - Illmo to Dexter, MO" is 2 hours and 24 minutes in length and is a two disk set. It can be watched with or without narration.

For nearly 100 years the Missouri Pacific and the Southern Pacific’s Cotton Belt subsidiary competed for business between the St. Louis gateway and the Southwest, sharing each other’s track between East St. Louis and Dexter, Missouri. Today, Union Pacific owns both lines and traffic has begun growing again after dropping during the great recession, spurred on by unit trains of crude oil headed to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Trains are getting longer and heavier with some having radio controlled distributed power fore and aft. Foreign power abounds as UP and its eastern connections pool power on many trains. In addition BNSF has overhead rights on this line to East St. Louis. This program shows all the trains in October of 2013 for over twenty-four hours on the critical single track portion of UP’s Chester Subdivision south of East St. Louis between Illmo on the Mississippi River and Dexter in southeast Missouri. Dexter is where the lines divide and directional running to Texas begins. The traffic on this line is extremely varied with manifests toting chemicals from the Gulf Coast, trains carrying autos and auto parts for auto distribution centers and assembly plants in Texas and Mexico, the Texas and Mexico intermodal fleet to and from Chicago, and many types of unit trains clogging this single track section as you will see. This is the same stretch of track covered nineteen years ago in our program titled “River Wars I – the Mississippi River”. "UP - Illmo to Dexter, MO" is two hours and 24 minutes in length and is a two disk set. It can be watched with or without narration.

The historic, former Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy line from Chicago to Denver, now BNSF’s Chicago to Denver main line, was the heart and soul of the Burlington Route. Often referred to as “the way of the Zephyrs”, this line in eastern Iowa where this program was videotaped, once hosted the Burlington’s Denver and California Zephyr passenger trains, the famous Fast Mail, the Chicago to Denver hot shot freight trains, and the eastbound meat trains out of Omaha and Lincoln. In spite of the favoritism shown it by Burlington officials, the CB&Q’s Denver line across eastern Iowa was never a major freight route and hosted almost as many passenger trains as freight trains as late as the early 1960s. Today this line still hosts Amtrak’s California Zephyr but low sulfur coal out of the Powder River Basin bound for Midwestern power plants is what has allowed this line to flourish in recent years as it carries more freight tonnage today than ever. And with the congestion in North Dakota and eastern Montana caused by the influx of crude oil trains from the Bakken Shale oil field, some transcontinental trains have been re-routed off of the Hi Line that runs through northern Montana and North Dakota through here. This program shows over twenty-four hours of action on the central part of BNSF’s Ottumwa Subdivision west of Burlington in October of 2013. "BNSF west of Burlington, Iowa" is one hour and 41 minutes long. This DVD can be watched with or without narration.