Railroad Crossing Closing, Lakewood Ohio in album Cleveland

In Albums: Cleveland

Oct 17th, 2004, by Alex Zorach

This photo shows a railroad crossing closing as a freight train approaches, in Lakewood, Ohio.

Lakewood, Ohio, has a particularly impractical freight rail line through it. Most of the streets in Lakewood run north-south, and this line cuts east-west across the length of the city, crossing nearly all of the streets. The city has a crossing on each of these small north-south streets, of which there are almost more than one can count. By law, the trains are required to sound their train whistle at each crossing. The result is an always comical, but often annoying series of train whistles blowing one after another, for minutes, as the train traverses the 3-mile-wide stretch of track in Lakewood, Ohio, and continues on to similar crossings in the neighboring section of Cleveland Ohio to the east, which has an identical layout for five more blocks.

I'm happy that I was able to get this photo to come out. It was taken with my first digital camera, which, for its early date of manufacture, was quite outstanding at taking photos in low lighting without a flash. This photo captured nearly exactly what the area looked like at the time. Moments later I photographed a car stopped at the crossing and a train zooming past.