Pan Am Railways (PAR) Maintenance of Way (MoW) Activity

690 wrote:They already have brought it up to 25, and are keeping it at that. It's been like that for a couple of years now. Eliminating the need for new Form Ds and Line 2 additions, as well as having to throw switches removes one of the bigger time sinks in moving trains between Leeds and Waterville.

Apparently not.. today's ST speedo. Hell of a lot better than it was, but still some 10 in there

144-147 is a recent downgrade on account of the tie crews currently working in that section.
111-113 run concurrently with Waterville, and isn't really relevant to the point about it being 25 from Waterville to Rigby.
118-119 will presumably be taken care of in the short term as the tie crew moves east.

It's fairly easy to infer all of that by looking at this vs the previous TSRBs (and a TT).

Like I said, this is light years ahead of how it was in the previous years, and they will need to keep that way to keep velocity up. Time will tell like all things Pan Am.

I have been told the stretch from Lewiston to Leeds is rough at track speed. I would expect to see either the tamping crew there or the speed to be dropped before winter.

Is Pan Am using its own track maintenance equipment for this effort or is it borrowing New Brunswick Southern's gear (and crew) as it did for the D3 upgrade last fall?

NBM is doing the work.

Ties previously reported placed in Winthrop have since been installed. MoW equipment spent the weekend in town.

Looked like every third or fourth tie on average. Quite a few close clusters and a handful of five or six tie gaps. Remaining bad ties are few and far between (if any). Also found it interesting that what did come out was not the usual splinters and badly broken wood. I'm pretty sure that several of the replaced ties right at the crossing were less than ten years old and had been installed as part of the Main Street crossing rehabilitation earlier in the decade.

BostonUrbEx wrote:Yep, when the signal bungalow at Leeds Jct was taken out by a car, they didn't bother replacing it and turned off the whole ABS system there.

How much would it have cost to rebuild/replace that bungalow? Maine requires that all drivers carry at least $25K property damage liability insurance, and most drivers carry more than that.

Not even worth it as it was just ABS in DCS anyway, not CTC. Not overly helpful for Leeds.

The driver's insurance may have paid for the damage to the bungalow. That doesn't mean Pan Am had to spend it on replacing the bungalow.

From what I've been told they shut down ABS at Leeds Junction because the equipment was so old they could not find parts to fix the damaged pieces.

Sounds believable to me. By "find" they might have meant within the company as opposed to the parts market.

KSmitty wrote:All supposedly part of some bigger upgrades coming next year that will supposedly include rail and maybe some new signals. Sure would be nice if they'd interlock Cressey, Roy and Leeds Jct. switches...

Signals are in the mix. Funding would be external. Not sure if it's islands or full CTC.

Not Pan Am funded Tie Replacement but starting Monday 10/15/18 and running through November, Keolis will be replacing 30,000 ties on Pan Am-owned and MBTA-owned track between Wachusett (presumably east of CPF-333?) and Littleton/495. Work window will be 0830 to 1630 M-F. I'm wondering if there will be any significant impact on PAS/PAR daytime train ops between CPF-333 and CPF-WL?
http://www.keoliscs.com/news/keolis-mbt ... rail-line/

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