Hello everyone. In mid-March 2024, Cincy Railfan Productions and I spent an early spring day of railfanning along the northern portion of the Norfolk Southern Rathole Line. This Norfolk Southern line is the busiest railway line in the Northern Kentucky region as it is the mainline between Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Train traffic along this mainline is rather diverse with a good mixture of intermodal, manifest, and unit trains each day. The line is known for rolling through the lovely rolling hills of Kentucky, passing through the horse farms and forests of the Commonwealth.
Many of these trains are the same trains that pass through the notable hotspots of the Kentucky High Bridge and through Cincinnati, Ohio. In a span of about 12 hours, Cincy Railfan Productions and I saw a total of 13 trains and missed an additional northbound intermodal train. Traffic was a little on the low side given that this line sees between 25 to 30 trains on the typical day, but we did see a decent amount of foreign power, a couple of Norfolk Southern Dash 9's, and NS 4001, one of the six special-painted AC44C6Ms as the third engine on northbound intermodal train 26C. This catch and the sunny weather made up for the downturn in train traffic, and the two of us had a solid day of railfanning along one of Kentucky's busiest railway lines. We hope to see more traffic the next time we go railfanning down here.
Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoy the video!
-N&W475.