The Cardinal System was introduced to the model railroad public at the 1988 National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) convention in Birmingham, Alabama. It was is a loose association of model railroads as listed here:

South Ridge Lines and Davies Steel – Dean Freytag, MMR-Master Model Railroader (1924-2010)

Blue Ridge and Southern – John Roberts, MMR (1948-2013)

Iron Belt Railroad and Calumet & Lake Erie – Hal Kattau (1939-2022)

New Hope and Jackson – Jack Brown

At the convention, each member presented a clinic on his railroad, accompanied by a 12-page printed handout which included a description of each railroad, a map of the system and detailed drawings of the locomotive paint schemes.

The system name came about because all four lived in states that had the cardinal as the state bird, even though their individual railroads might have been located in other states. In their minds, the Cardinal System had just come into being and, like in the first days of Conrail, very little was lettered specifically for the system. Conrail started identifying equipment by slapping a patch job on freight cars with a white “C” and “R” from the word “Central” in the Penn Central stencil. In the same way, one might occasionally find a piece of rolling stock labeled “Cardinal System” in addition to its original lettering, but no formal paint scheme for motive power had yet been adopted – and hasn’t to this day! Roberts “adopted” the locomotive paint scheme from the Lake Superior & Ishpeming’s new image (for 1988!) for his Blue Ridge and Southern. Kattau followed suit by adopting the same scheme for his Calumet & Lake Erie.

Operations

High quality coal mined in western Virginia is shipped via the Blue Ridge and Southern to an interchange with the C&O at Eagle Rock, Va. Next, the coal is interchanged with the Kelly’s Creek & Bradley and then interchanged with the Virginian & Ohio which moves it north to a connection at Iron City, Ohio, where it is either transferred to Davies Steel or sent west to Ohio Calumet Steel via the C&LE.

(As one can see, Cardinal System railroads interact with other freelance railroads, as well as with actual prototype railroads.) New Hope & Jackson fits into the picture by supplying refractory products for many purposes at Davies Steel and Ohio Calumet Steel. Blast furnace ovens, the blast furnaces themselves, open hearth ovens, mixers, ladles, hot metal cars (and anything else that comes into contact with molten iron or coal as it is transformed into coke) all use a tremendous amount of refractory products not only in their initial construction but in maintenance and relining. The New Hope & Jackson takes these products to an interchange with the Western Maryland Railway at Jackson, Pa., and the WMRY carries the merchandise to an interchange at Connellsville, Pa., with the South Ridge, which takes it to Davies Steel and C&LE connections.

Calumet & Lake Erie is a class one road that carries on a lively interchange of iron, steel and steel-related materials between the corporately-related Davies Steel in Iron City, Ohio, and Ohio Calumet Steel in Watakah, Ill., and Gary, Ind. All switching between these plants and interchange roads is handled by the Iron Belt Railroad. The Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad provides transportation between Ohio Calumet’s rolling mills and fabricating plants on the Ohio River and the Calumet area. The much larger South Ridge Lines also reaches western markets by racing across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois to connect with the CB&Q at Burlington, Iowa.

Of the four members of the Cardinal System, only Dean Freytag had anything approaching the aircraft carrier-sized basement the operations might lead one to believe were required. The Iron Belt was, in fact, a 13-foot-by-nine-foot modular L-shaped layout along two walls. The concept of the Cardinal System is what helped us plan our operations and provided an enormous amount of good fellowship, which is what the whole thing is about anyway.