2015 - The Real Winter of Our Discount Tent

I've joked about these things before but this year the railroads in New England are really hurting from extreme cold and high volumes of snow.  The listserv's are full of why service has fallen off and the media has been hammering the MBTA (Keolis) so I'll leave the why alone, mostly.  The very same snowbanks that have hampered operations on the rails have kept me from boldly going where I can photograph much, especially those plow specials.  But, I did manage a couple of shots that show the snow here in Maine.  While snow is no big deal up this way, the railroads are a shade less able to conquer it. 

Here we see GATX 406 sitting in the snowy Waterville yard on 2/18/15.   I have a predisposition towards GP15's anyway, so to get this one amidst the snowbanks was neat.  The rising steam was from the shops complex.  The trailing "sludge gray" unit was a common 300's range GP40.

The real story of that day is that an oil extra with BNSF power had passed a couple of hours earlier, and, the B&M heritage 'geep' was working the SAPPI branch.  Of course Carl and I missed all of that excitement.  










On the way home we managed to catch up with either RUPO or WAPO (or whatever the symbol was) around Lewiston.  We saw this train pull up to the switch at Fairgrounds East (the new name escapes me) and we intercepted at Strawberry Ave.  The lead was 517 in blue,  a "sludge gray" was second and the former SLR yellow leaser trailed. The signal at Fairgrounds West was yellow and we knew another train (WB I think) was at Danville.  This train halted where I photographed it.  The main was clear of snow but this guy waited on the siding for some reason.  We moved on and called it a day.  It was too cold to stand around long.  Later in the week a Rumford train would be left on the siding without its power so passing was not an option.  Leeds also had a train and a PAR blue leaser sitting at Roy for days.

A few days later on 2/21 there was a train show in Augusta and another chance to follow District 1.  Carl and I got as far as Subway/Fairgrounds in Lewiston where the crew of a Waterville train AYWA was stopped for lunch.   Unit 600 was on the point and there were a pair of NS SD40-2's on the rear.  They moved on soon after I got some photos.  We got them again at the MP157.2 detector where there were fewer snow banks in the way of detail shots. 

The snowbanks did hamper efforts to get photos in Lewiston.  They also proved to be annoying when we got to Winthrop and found a  619 POWA slugging through town.  By the time we got to a good photo spot the tall snow piles in a bank parking lot cost us the few seconds we needed to get into position.  But that was a bit later.  We stopped by Leeds Jct. again.  The lease unit and cars were still at Roy and a WAPO was tying down at Cressey.  Apparently getting stuff to Waterville was a priority this day.  The ballast regulator/plow from Rumford was sitting on the north siding with the Waterville Russell plow (the PAR painted one). 

 

Paraphrasing one forum poster "each train required a herculean effort" anywhere east of Selkirk.  Units OOS all over the place and disabled trains taking up the passing points.  A form of meltdown.  CSX and other roads were not immune.  I would be sympathetic but today, well more than a week after the last storm, I read of an MBTA plow finally getting to one of their lines.  Does anyone in charge know that it snows every year?  Some years might even be like this one.  Cutting capital to the bone - apparently including losing seldom used snow fighting equipment and having lean MOW forces certainly - exacerbate the situation.   But again, I only have a couple of irrelevant college degrees and no rail experience so I have no real expertise here.  I'm just a railfan taking pictures and will not complicate anything by pretending to know operations.

BC