Green Bay, Wisconsin Rapids, Plover, and Stevens Point WI Railroads, 90s

More from my early 90s railroad videos, this time I am all over central and eastern Wisconsin. In the early 90s my railfanning friend and I were on a quest to find Alcos, and there was no better place to see them close to us than the Green Bay and Western, so we packed up my S10 and headed off to Green Bay.

Green Bay was a really neat place to see trains in the 90s, there were three railroads operating out of three yard that were just blocks from each other. The Green Bay and Western was a target but seeing all the Wisconsin Central unpainted (or un-repainted) power was worth some video tape. The WC had a yard in town which had a diamond crossing on the yard lead with the Fox River Valley railroad (ex-CNW).

Speaking of the Fox River Valley railroad, they were operating all the old CNW tracks with a bunch of old CNW geeps, notably were a fleet of GP-30s. The FRV was only two years old when we saw it and non of the locomotives were filmed were painted in FRV colors. Two surprises were a pair of high hood geeps working the yard, one in DT&I paint and the other in Central Vermont, no patch work to either.

The big game in town was the GB&W and we tried to not get distracted and focus on filming them as much as possible. The first stop was Norwood yard in downtown Green Bay. If there ever was a "Vest Pocket" yard it was Norwood. The yard was packed into a neighbor hood, with road crossings on the yard leads for what seemed like every block, what a pain it must have been for both the railroad and the residents trying to drive across the tracks. Norwood had a turntable, a wye, and a tall old grain elevator (in the center of the wye).

The wye at Norwood had one track that headed due north to a small yard called McDonald yard. I believe that McDonald yard was used to supply cars for the Kewaunee line, which supplies cars for the lake Michigan car ferries.

I made several trips to Green Bay between 1990 and 1993, filming mostly around Green Bay. Some train chases took us to some of the surrounding areas to watch some fine Alco smoking, I mean switching at some industrial areas.

Along with Green Bay I also made some shorter trips to the middle of Wisconsin where the GBW had another yard. About midway along the GBW mainline to Minnesota was a couple small yards, one in Wisconsin Rapids and one in nearby Plover. Wisconsin Rapids was a nice "day trip" for me so I went there a few times, some in the winter and some in the summer. Wisconsin Rapids was right next to Stevens Point, which was a big yard on the Wisconsin Central. Strangely enough i never really went to the WC yard to film.

There was also some other non-GBW Alco action near Wisconsin rapids in the town of Nekoosa. A paper mill had some nice S6 locomotive with an attractive blue and yellow paint scheme.

Again, this is a lot of video tape, lots of full run-byes, and lots of switching. Normally I would edit a lot of this out but I decided to leave it all in. Sorry if it gets long but a lot of this stuff is all gone. Actually all three railroads are gone and a lot of the tracks in these videos are gone.