Freight and General New England RR News

Stlin said:
Today's Facebook marketplace find: an F7 Locomotive from the G&U for the price of a secondhand Toyota. *shipping and delivery not included.

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That would be awesome to just buy and live in. A railfan's ultimate residence. Plop it down on a piece of property, as building codes and zoning allows.
 
We did the Blackstone Valley polar express holiday train last night--delightful again.

Admittedly, it was a little early in the holiday season for it--but that brought the unexpected benefit of our train car being only about 50% full and thus much less stuffy and more relaxing than when we went last year in December. Still quite expensive, but absolutely worth it--it's a "high-touch" production, with a very large (though not bloated; everyone's constantly busy) staff--holiday village vendors, the various conductors, the MC who gets the crowd fired-up a few minutes prior to boarding, the lead performing elf and her assistants in each car, Santas for each car, and all of the performers at the North Pole Village at the turnaround, which is somewhere in Uxbridge/Whitinsville.

It's all very intimate, approachable, and charmingly provincial, the opposite of the Disney global industrial-entertainment complex.

Not only is it the oldest/longest-running of these officially licensed Polar Express holiday trains, but, there's a neat RI connection I learned of last night--Polar Express author Chris Van Allsburg, much like that other giant of 1980s children's illustration, David Macaulay, attended RISD.

You do wonder, if you could teleport a factory worker from 200 years ago from the Blackstone River Valley--one of the most intensely industrialized sites on earth circa 1820, as I imagine the Blackstone corridor heritage trail exhaustively documents--what they would think of the holiday train and how the area has transformed overall, 50 years deep into deindustrialization...
 

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Norfolk Southern double-stack intermodal service started yesterday from Chicago-Binghamton-Ayer via the B&A + Worcester Branch routing. That was a competitive concession to NS in CSX's acquisition of Pan Am, following completion of a year's worth of construction for vertical clearance improvements between Worcester and Ayer. NS ran the train with its Conrail and Delaware & Hudson -paint heritage locomotives leading.

That means that intermodal cubes no longer trawl the Patriot Corridor between Mechanicville, NY and Ayer...but traffic is up enough overall on the corridor that Berkshire & Eastern's heavily-revamped schedule debuting yesterday features no net loss of corridor trains. The run times are different (and apparently that's caused an avalanche of delay headaches for outer Fitchburg Line commuters the last couple days as they work the bugs out of the dispatching), but there's enough autorack, trash cube, and general freight (all of which are contractually prohibited from using the CSX/B&A route and are required to stay on the Patriot Corridor) to go around that they're running the same number of daily trains as before.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Norfolk Southern double-stack intermodal service started yesterday from Chicago-Binghamton-Ayer via the B&A + Worcester Branch routing. That was a competitive concession to NS in CSX's acquisition of Pan Am, following completion of a year's worth of construction for vertical clearance improvements between Worcester and Ayer. NS ran the train with its Conrail and Delaware & Hudson -paint heritage locomotives leading.

That means that intermodal cubes no longer trawl the Patriot Corridor between Mechanicville, NY and Ayer...but traffic is up enough overall on the corridor that Berkshire & Eastern's heavily-revamped schedule debuting yesterday features no net loss of corridor trains. The run times are different (and apparently that's caused an avalanche of delay headaches for outer Fitchburg Line commuters the last couple days as they work the bugs out of the dispatching), but there's enough autorack, trash cube, and general freight (all of which are contractually prohibited from using the CSX/B&A route and are required to stay on the Patriot Corridor) to go around that they're running the same number of daily trains as before.
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Is NS still planning to eventually build out a full rail yard in the area between WPI life sciences buildings and 290? I vaguely recall there being talk of that awhile back but im just a casual observer of this stuff.
 
393b40 said:
Is NS still planning to eventually build out a full rail yard in the area between WPI life sciences buildings and 290? I vaguely recall there being talk of that awhile back but im just a casual observer of this stuff.
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That's CSX Barbers Yard, which they want reactivated for the first time since Guilford/Pan Am let it die in the mid-1990's to become a crew-change pitstop on their Selkirk-Portland runs (right now those changes happen awkwardly at a random grade crossing) and place to drop cuts of cars for Providence & Worcester to come across town to fetch for themselves instead of wasting time shoving backwards into P&W's yard every day. They brush-cut the whole property last year and moved some dirt around, but haven't done anything else yet. The new yard is only supposed to be 2-3 (fairly long) tracks when all is said and done, less expansive than it was in its previous life.

NS only has trackage rights--and only for 1 daily round-trip, with caps on train length, and prohibition from moving any non- cube intermodal freight--on the new B&A train. So eventually if they grow Ayer terminal enough they'll need to clear the Patriot Corridor and Hoosac Tunnel 1 more foot and move the train back onto home turf to avoid having that growth get choked off by the limits CSX imposes on the trackage rights. But this buys them a solid decade to plan that out and concentrate on growing the Ayer business to a level that fully merits the clearance investment. There's lots of new investment planned in the next couple years for modernizing and expanding Hill Hard in Ayer to become more of an intermodal heavyweight.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Norfolk Southern double-stack intermodal service started yesterday from Chicago-Binghamton-Ayer via the B&A + Worcester Branch routing. That was a competitive concession to NS in CSX's acquisition of Pan Am, following completion of a year's worth of construction for vertical clearance improvements between Worcester and Ayer. NS ran the train with its Conrail and Delaware & Hudson -paint heritage locomotives leading.

That means that intermodal cubes no longer trawl the Patriot Corridor between Mechanicville, NY and Ayer...but traffic is up enough overall on the corridor that Berkshire & Eastern's heavily-revamped schedule debuting yesterday features no net loss of corridor trains. The run times are different (and apparently that's caused an avalanche of delay headaches for outer Fitchburg Line commuters the last couple days as they work the bugs out of the dispatching), but there's enough autorack, trash cube, and general freight (all of which are contractually prohibited from using the CSX/B&A route and are required to stay on the Patriot Corridor) to go around that they're running the same number of daily trains as before.
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Anyone have the new schedule they could post?
 
Tallguy said:
Anyone have the new schedule they could post?
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NS intermodal train Z618 enters the B&A via Vorheesville, NY in the wee hours of the morning, and arrives at Ayer around 10:00am which means it passes through the back of Worcester Union Station around morning rush. Don't know when the return trip Z619 runs.

I don't see any run times for the new Patriot Corridor lineup, but the big main trains now are:
  • Berkshire & Eastern MOED (eastbound)/EDMO (westbound) -- Mohawk/Mechanicville to East Deerfield general freight, picking up loads from a NS Binghamton-Mohawk job and the Canadian Pacific interchange @ Mohawk. Also serves the Vermont Rail System interchange at Hoosick Jct. in New York.
  • Norfolk Southern 16R (eastbound)/17R (westbound)-- Binghamton-Ayer autoracks and trash cubes (double-stacked, though the trash cubes are shorter in height than intermodal cubes). Trash is loaded at the old auto-loading yard a little bit west of Willows Jct. in Ayer. Autoracks go to the newer auto loading yard on the Stony Brook Branch just east of Willows. Don't know what the B&E symbols are, but those would be "paper"-only since the train runs nonstop from native NS territory.
  • Berkshire & Eastern EDAY (eastbound)/AYED (westbound) - East Deerfield-Ayer general freight. Stops at Gardner for the P&W interchange, East Fitchburg Yard as a yard-stocker, and Ayer for the small amount of CSX interchanging that still happens at Hill Yard. P&W interchange used to be a whole separate train, so this might be the one that's screwing with Fitchburg Line schedules this week if they didn't anticipate the timing of work in Gardner Yard outside of MBTA territory meshing right with the timing of work at East Fitchburg and Ayer inside MBTA territory.
There's East Deerfield and East Fitchburg -originating locals in there too that work both the west end (North Adams into New York @ the Batten Kill RR shortline interchange) and east end (Otter River to Ayer/Littleton), though the schedules are a bit more scattershot given variable daily workloads. I also don't know what train serves the main CSX interchange at Rotterdam, NY...whether that's another dedicated East Deerfield train or a local. RR.net is saying there's still 6 daily trains going through the Hoosac Tunnel, so something is picking up the slack for Rotterdam. For MBTA territory I don't see many pictures of the locals on the NErail photo site, so they're almost certainly run well on the MBTA off-peak. The two thru train pairs in MBTA territory definitely run (at least in one direction) during prime commuting hours, though the 16R/17R nonstop has a lot less potential for passenger interference than EDAY/AYED that has yard work along the way.
 
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www.nbcconnecticut.com

Train carrying liquid propane derails in Mansfield

A train has derailed near Route 32 in Mansfield, the town and emergency officials said. Fourteen train cars derailed, and five landed in a river, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The train was carrying liquid propane for home heating, lumber, grain, and grease...
www.nbcconnecticut.com www.nbcconnecticut.com
 
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