Carl and I took a near-spontaneous trip to Mass. to see something different. Almost all of what's left of freight in the southern half of the state is nocturnal these days unless you want to chase down branches with very sporadic operations. We were growing weary of driving all over Maine and seeing maybe one train. Lately that one train has been a scheduled Downeaster. Not much excitement there. Brownville Jct. is seeing more action these days but we figured the same driving would also take us to Worcester. As it turned out, Bill Leazer had the day off so we started by meeting him at Flynn's Truck Stop in Shrewsbury to pick him up.
After a good breakfast at the Edgemere Diner just down the street, we moved on to Worcester. Union Station on a Saturday morning is wide open for parking, but we at least got to see an MBTA train leave for Boston and the layover yard was full. CSX and the P&W were quiet. The intermodal yard was quiet too. Little radio chatter. So, after we took a walk down the platform, where I took some photos in morning light, we moved on to Palmer, W. Springfield, E.Deerfield, then Greenfield. The album below has the captioned photos of the tour.
The Flickr album is here:
It was a hot day. My car thermometer got up to 94+ with a lovely humidity to accompany it. We dropped by the Gardner T station/Chinese Restaurant where an autorack and a local were parked. But, it wasn't to be our day for freight trains. We moved south back to Flynn's on Rt. 140, which turned out to be a quiet and scenic route around all the urban crap. We said our goodbye's and headed back to Maine. It was a long day, especially when the heat took so much out of us. But it was worth it to hang out with Billy and reconnoiter a piece of the new Conn River route.
BC
