Freight and General New England RR News


The number of freight railroads in Massachusetts decreases by one. Mass Coastal Railroad acquires the trackage rights and line assets of Bay Colony Railroad: the MassDOT-owned Wattupa Branch from New Bedford to Westport, and the MBTA-owned Millis Industrial Track from Medfield to Millis. Bay Colony began 41 years ago operating a fairly sizeable network in Eastern MA (Millis-Medfield-Needham-Newton, Wattupa, Cape Cod Main Middleboro-Hyannis and South Dennis stub, Falmouth Branch to Falmouth Depot, Plymouth Line, Hanover Branch, Greenbush Line to Cohasset, Taunton's Dean St. Industrial Track, the Framingham & Lowell from West Concord to Acton). But inability to hold onto customers led to mass abandonments, and Mass Coastal outbid them for the Cape Trash Train 15 years ago. They were whittled down to just a couple of customers on the Wattupa and on-again/off-again (for the last 2-1/2 years, off-again) activity in Millis. Now they're extinct.

Mass Coastal gains a beneficial extension of their contiguous network, eliminating the BC interchange at New Bedford for direct service to Westport (primarily scrap business) with opportunities at a Dartmouth industrial park to pick up a couple more customers. They probably have little to no interest in Millis since the intermittent cement sand transloading operation doesn't look like it's ever coming back. It's likely that BC told them "take it all, or take none of it" for its inclusion in the sale. This may end up finally pushing that line towards abandonment.

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Sort of bittersweet for me. A lot of us were wondering why they stuck around for as long as they did. Maybe it was for two of their "legacy" employees to retire ( done in 2022/23) or to see if Mass Coastal made a go it. If it weren't for BCLR, there would've been a lot less trackage in S.E. Massachusetts today.

I agree that the Millis was a take it or leave it thing. Don't see much hope for it, even with the trestle work BCLR did a few years ago. The irony here is that Mass Coastal's owner originally attempted to get this line when it still was active to Needham many years ago!

Dartmouth is brighter. There are rumors the Mid-City Scrap will be ramping things up in 2024. Ironically, they are located on MC track and BCLR did the switching! DBS was the only true BCLR customer on the line! As far as potential for the Watuppa, I think its stuck with what is there. Maybe if they can extend/reopen the line to Sanford St in Westport where Mid-City Steel is located (old Westport Drive-In). Don't see the beer traffic coming back. Colonial doesn't seem interested.

BTW, Watuppa is spelled with one "t"! Ha!
 
So, admittedly it's a little weird to put this in the Freight thread--but given that it involves activities of the Genessee & Wyoming RR, it really seems like the most logical thread to add this to.

Anywho... my wife had the foresight to buy tickets for her and our 6-yr-old, months in advance, for the G&W's upcoming Polar Express Christmas train ride that starts/ends in Downtown Woonsocket. (Apparently these tickets are HOT.)

The page says it's a 45-minute trip to "the North Pole"--I'm guessing said magical fantasyland destination is NOT located 25 miles uptrack at the switchyard terminus south of Downtown Worcester (though going that distance in 45 minutes would equate to a 33 mph pace, which strikes me as sedate enough for the kiddies).

Am I jealous I'm not going? Heck yes! (At least, jealous I'm missing the train experience--I can 100% skip the "Polar Express" branding of the journey). I suppose there will be more opportunities down the road for me to check-out the Blackstone Heritage Corridor, which I've heard is quite remarkable.
 
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DBM said:
The page says it's a 45-minute trip to "the North Pole"--I'm guessing said magical fantasyland destination is NOT located 25 miles uptrack at the switchyard terminus south of Downtown Worcester (though going that distance in 45 minutes would equate to a 33 mph pace, which strikes me as sedate enough for the kiddies).
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The P&W main is good for 60 MPH passenger, so they probably do make it to the yards in Worcester (they don't have trackage rights into Worcester Union Station).
 
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F-Line to Dudley said:
The P&W main is good for 60 MPH passenger, so they probably do make it to the yards in Worcester (they don't have trackage rights into Worcester Union Station).
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I would not have guessed that! Informative as always, thanks [and I presume ample photographic documentation will brought home for me to scrutinize vis-a-vis how far uptrack they end up going...]
 
DBM said:
So, admittedly it's a little weird to put this in the Freight thread--but given that it involves activities of the Genessee & Wyoming RR, it really seems like the most logical read to add this to.

Anywho... my wife had the foresight to buy tickets for her and our 6-yr-old, months in advance, for the G&W's upcoming Polar Express Christmas train ride that starts/ends in Downtown Woonsocket. (Apparently these tickets are HOT.)

The page says it's a 45-minute trip to "the North Pole"--I'm guessing said magical fantasyland destination is NOT located 25 miles uptrack at the switchyard terminus south of Downtown Worcester (though going that distance in 45 minutes would equate to a 33 mph pace, which strikes me as sedate enough for the kiddies).

Am I jealous I'm not going? Heck yes! (At least, jealous I'm missing the train experience--I can 100% skip the "Polar Express" branding of the journey). I suppose there will be more opportunities down the road for me to check-out the Blackstone Heritage Corridor, which I've heard is quite remarkable.
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So Santa delivers presents by sleigh, but raw materials get to the workshop by freight rail? Seems obvious once you bring it up, logistics-wise.
 
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ritchiew said:
So Santa delivers presents by sleigh, but raw materials get to the workshop by freight rail? Seems obvious once you bring it up, logistics-wise.
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I just love the fact that there's surely some accounting honcho/comptroller type at the Genesee & Wyoming RR, and, for 99.7% of the year, they're reviewing unforeseen/incidental expenses relating to the continuous conveyance of bulk commodities.

This freight car got unexpectedly bashed a bit when the coal it was carrying shifted unusually and thus it needs refurbishment; that locomotive got dinged in the switchyard by a careless decoupling, so it needs an unexpected repainting. Etc., ad infinitum.

... and, then, buried in those thousands of invoices to review/dispute/approve, etc., there are the unforeseen expenses relating to this Polar Express thingy: the Santa impersonator's car broke down, driving to the Woonsocket Depot, so they need to pay-off Acme Towing Co. in Woonsocket. One of the illuminated reindeer displays along the tracks in Downtown Uxbridge got knocked over and smashed by a gust of wind, so it needs refurbishment, etc., etc...
 
DBM said:
I just love the fact that there's surely some accounting honcho/comptroller type at the Genesee & Wyoming RR, and, for 99.7% of the year, they're reviewing unforeseen/incidental expenses relating to the continuous conveyance of bulk commodities.

This freight car got unexpectedly bashed a bit when the coal it was carrying shifted unusually and thus it needs refurbishment; that locomotive got dinged in the switchyard by a careless decoupling, so it needs an unexpected repainting. Etc., ad infinitum.

... and, then, buried in those thousands of invoices to review/dispute/approve, etc., there are the unforeseen expenses relating to this Polar Express thingy: the Santa impersonator's car broke down, driving to the Woonsocket Depot, so they need to pay-off Acme Towing Co. in Woonsocket. One of the illuminated reindeer displays along the tracks in Downtown Uxbridge got knocked over and smashed by a gust of wind, so it needs refurbishment, etc., etc...
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P&W has been doing passenger excursions for all 50 years of their existence. They do more than just the Santa train, although most of their biz tends to be special event one-off and not anything regularly-scheduled. They've got a very nice excursion fleet that the Worcester shop lovingly takes care of.
 
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F-Line to Dudley said:
P&W has been doing passenger excursions for all 50 years of their existence. They do more than just the Santa train, although most of their biz tends to be special event one-off and not anything regularly-scheduled. They've got a very nice excursion fleet that the Worcester shop lovingly takes care of.
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The wife and I took a ride from Woonsocket up through Worcester and back down to Putnam, CT for a Halloween/Fall Festival several years back before we had a kid. Was a nice little ride, even if it felt weird to drive from Grafton to Woonsocket to then take a train back through Grafton to get to Putnam.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
P&W has been doing passenger excursions for all 50 years of their existence. They do more than just the Santa train, although most of their biz tends to be special event one-off and not anything regularly-scheduled. They've got a very nice excursion fleet that the Worcester shop lovingly takes care of.
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Great to hear! You also answered one of the questions that came immediately to mind--where are these G&W tourist trains kept sheltered from the elements and kept in handsome condition suitable for these types of fun excursions?
 
DBM said:
Great to hear! You also answered one of the questions that came immediately to mind--where are these G&W tourist trains kept sheltered from the elements and kept in handsome condition suitable for these types of fun excursions?
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Right here on Google, on the track immediately left of the shop building.

And from Southbridge St. on Street View.

7 cars total...a generator car at the front (to supply electricity for the coaches, since freight locomotives don't have HEP hookups like passenger locos do), 5 coaches, and an observation car (at the rear with the rounded end seen in the overhead view).
 
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Per RR.net. . .

CSX is beginning testing of Class 3 speeds on the Worcester-Ayer route, capping off a furious year's worth of upgrades to the formerly embarassingly decrepit Pan Am main. That will allow 40 MPH freight and 60 MPH passenger service on the route, speeds not seen in over 60 years. This will be crucial for T north-south equipment swaps when the Grand Junction Branch goes out-of-service for a couple years during Mass Pike Allston construction, as they'll now be able to do Boston-Worcester-Ayer-Somerville swaps in under 3 hours instead of 5-1/2.

It also, for the further future, checks off one item on the bucket list for taking the Grand Junction for Urban Ring LRT.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Per RR.net. . .

CSX is beginning testing of Class 3 speeds on the Worcester-Ayer route, capping off a furious year's worth of upgrades to the formerly embarassingly decrepit Pan Am main. That will allow 40 MPH freight and 60 MPH passenger service on the route, speeds not seen in over 60 years. This will be crucial for T north-south equipment swaps when the Grand Junction Branch goes out-of-service for a couple years during Mass Pike Allston construction, as they'll now be able to do Boston-Worcester-Ayer-Somerville swaps in under 3 hours instead of 5-1/2.

It also, for the further future, checks off one item on the bucket list for taking the Grand Junction for Urban Ring LRT.
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What class are the tracks now, 1?
 
The NY Times published a story about Timothy Mellon's quixotic political donations, which this year include millions for both Donald Trump and RFK Jr??

I'm posting the story here because it tangentially covers Mellon's notorious operation of Pan Am. CSX, which isn't exactly known for over-maintaining its trackage, had some pretty choice words for the condition in which he left the railroad:

In 2020, Mr. Mellon announced that he was selling Pan Am to CSX, one of the nation’s largest railroads. In a 2022 hearing, CSX officials said they had acquired a railway long in neglect.

“It was so overgrown with trees and weeds you don’t even know there’s a railroad there,” James Foote, then the chief executive of CSX, testified.
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Does anyone know how things are going with CSX's upgrades? Are we starting to see freight volumes increase to Maine? And any significant onward traffic to/from New Brunswick yet?

More speculatively, I wonder whether track upgrades could eventually enable restoration of intercity service to Halifax... Though that would require Canada to invest more in VIA, which does not seem forthcoming.
 
michaelw37 said:
More speculatively, I wonder whether track upgrades could eventually enable restoration of intercity service to Halifax... Though that would require Canada to invest more in VIA, which does not seem forthcoming.
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Seems unlikely to work, to me.

Historically it was slow, taking nearly 24 hours to cover 730mi.

The driving route is roughly 70mi shorter and takes about 10hrs.

You've also got the ferry (Bar Harbor-Yarmouth NS) and flights from Boston to compete with. Halifax has pre-clearance so there's even fewer obstacles with starting a service to Portland or the like than usual.

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The rail line from the US border to St. John in NB is very indirect and avoids basically every possible population or tourism demand source. Doesn't serve the coast or Fredericton, significantly longer than the road route.

Other than St. John (which still isn't all that big) you've got very little for population or tourism demand all the way to Moncton. The line is too far inland for visiting any of the tourism the region does have (Bay of Fundy).

The NB countryside is also often....depressing - trees, ugly logging clearcut, repeat.

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In short, I'd put it very, very low on VIA's list of places to invest.
 
michaelw37 said:
Does anyone know how things are going with CSX's upgrades? Are we starting to see freight volumes increase to Maine? And any significant onward traffic to/from New Brunswick yet?
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They've done the following since taking over.
  • Upgraded the Worcester-Ayer line to 40 MPH freight/60 MPH passenger with all-new rail. They're now starting the clearance work for allowing double-stack trains to Ayer, which involves undercutting one road bridge and raising the Downtown Clinton overpass of the Fitchburg Secondary line. And it's expected that they will lay their own track from the tunnel portal in Downtown Worcester to Barbers Jct. so they can run separate from the P&W dispatcher (the P&W track is considered within yard limits with a 10 MPH speed limit).
  • Brush-cleared the derelict Barbers Freight Yard in Worcester along I-290 in preparation for installing new yard tracks and an engine turntable. Barbers will serve as the new P&W interchange point, saving them time from having to shove deep into the P&W Southbridge St. yard; it'll serve as the new crew quick-change point for super-long Albany-Maine runs; and the turntable will allow them to reverse direction on their engines without having to pay P&W to wye them inside of their yard.
  • Upgraded freight speeds on the Western Route from the NH state line to Portland. Freights now run 60 MPH (79 MPH passenger), instead of the artificially-capped 40 MPH that Pan Am run to save on maintenance. They're in the process of installing Positive Train Control to Portland and Brunswick, which will also allow for Downeaster frequency increases.
  • They've done major repairs and renovations on Rigby Freight Yard in South Portland, correcting a lot of the inefficiencies and unsafe working conditions from the Pan Am era. That's allowing for quicker drop-offs from the Albany-Portland thru trains and quicker thru-routing to Waterville and Mattawamkeag/St. John. They've demolished the derelict western third of the yard in possible prep for that becoming the new Portland intermodal ramp. Since Rigby is the linchpin of all traffic northeast of Worcester, these are particularly key upgrades.
  • They reopened the Bangor-Mattawamkeag mainline with full rail/tie upgrades, and have reopened the Mattawamkeag interchange yard with New Brunswick Southern (previously they were getting New Brunswick cars in Bangor through a haulage agreement with Canadian Pacific, which severely depressed what they could muster for Canadian carloads). They're doing land-clearing to expand the Mattawamkeag yard, which currently is very small and awkward for staging large car counts without blocking the adjacent grade crossings. That interchange is where they hope to drive all of their St. John carload growth.
  • Large amounts of rail replacement between the Royal Junction split with the Downeaster in Yarmouth, ME to Mattawamkeag in pursuit of an even 40 MPH trans-Maine mainline. They've got a ways to go as much of it is still 25 MPH with a couple lingering 10 MPH spots north of Bangor, but their 2024-25 goal is to whack all the speed restrictions and uprate the whole way so much simpler crew changes at Portland and Waterville can whisk the same Albany-originating manifest train all the way across the network.
  • Elimination of a lot of Pan Am slop ops. The crew changes are happening a lot faster, trains are no longer being outlawed on sidings because they ran out of crew hours running late, they're running at authorized track speed, the dispatching has been smoothed out (less MBTA and Downeaster conflicts), they've filled in a lot of radio dead spots across Northern Maine with new transmitters.
  • Branchlines are getting some attention. The Portsmouth Branch has gotten a lot of welded rail dropped for future installation, and they're refurbishing the Portsmouth yard and Newington runaround for business increases at the port. The woefallen Hillsboro Branch in New Hampshire has gotten some decades-overdue roadbed work and tie replacement to tame its all-world bad derailment issues. They did siding work at the Concord end of the NH Main so reversing directions on the Nashua-Concord local doesn't require so many time-consuming shunting moves in Downtown Concord.
  • Not totally Maine-related, but they just scored a grant for a major grade crossing elimination in West Springfield about a mile west of West Springfield Yard. Those crossings are blocked for minutes on end by max-length B&A intermodal trains as they slow into West Springfield Yard to be broken apart for continuing east. The project is in direct anticipation of the Albany-Maine feeder trains getting much, much longer in the near future.
It's a little early to be feasting on business increases, as much of the last year has been transitioning the Pan Am customer base from PAR's paleolithic-era customer service portal to CSX's much more modern back-office systems and trying to stabilize the on-time performance. They aren't in purely expansionary mode as the sale of PAR led to a lot of staff departures that they've had to aggressively hire to shore up. The main constraint to traffic and performance growth that they face in 2024 are still the staff shortages, so there's lots of work to continue to do before the Sales Dept. is really capable of putting on a full-court press. But they've got sky-high upside now that the mainline is real mainline-grade end-to-end and it doesn't take many days, fistfulls of crew-changes, and lots of stopovers and downtime to get loads across the ex-PAR system.
michaelw37 said:
More speculatively, I wonder whether track upgrades could eventually enable restoration of intercity service to Halifax... Though that would require Canada to invest more in VIA, which does not seem forthcoming.
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@millerm277 outlines the main reasons why Halifax wouldn't work. The times sucked even when the B&M Gull was making that run on well-maintained track from 1930-1960 because of how roundabout the routing is. And it's just a few miles too short to qualify for Amtrak Long-Distance status, so it would have to be entirely state-supported and would be unlikely to be stocked with LD cars like sleepers and diners that are pretty much demanded of a route that long on the clock. Maine and Massachusetts really can't afford out-of-pocket to procure some Viewliners from the LD pool to serve the customer service demands of the route. Then there's the need to set up a whole new Customs stop in Vanceboro, ME, which would be easier if VIA Rail's Atlantic were still running across Northern Maine...but VIA has turned a deaf ear to the advocacy from the Maritime Provinces to restore that service. And there's a need to deal with 3 host RR's--CSX (U.S.), New Brunswick Southern (U.S. and Canada) and CN (Canada)--en route...CN in particular being very passenger-hostile and a constant source of delays on VIA's Montreal-Halifax Ocean route. And Transport Canada (Canadian FRA+FTA) is a particularly limp and useless agency when it comes to muscling resources for intercity passenger rail.

Downeaster to Bangor gets a lot easier with a Maine Central mainline that's up to full state-of-repair (the last study was a tankapalooza effort, though). But that's likely as far north as you're ever planting the passenger rail flag.
 

MEDOT’s Rockland Branch RFP was posted about three weeks ago. They’re seeking an operator for a 10-year term.

It also included the following language to set expectations for scheduling freight to accommodate Amtrak’s proposed passenger service pilot (I didn’t know the specifics before so I called them out in bold):

Additionally, MaineDOT is seeking proposals from operators who are interested in serving as host railroad for a proposed Amtrak pilot service over the Rockland Branch. The final AMTRAK schedule is subject to change, but the current proposed Amtrak 2- year pilot service includes the following trip schedules:
• Between Brunswick and Bath two times daily, Monday-Friday year-round to serve Bath Iron Works.
• Seasonal May-October two to three times per day Thursday-Sunday between Brunswick and Rockland.
The host railroad is expected to limit operational windows for freight and excursion service when Amtrak trains are present (freight service would likely have to occur at night; excursion service would likely be limited to Monday-Wednesday)
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