"Up North" Gawking (District 1 sightings)

Lac Megantic was the death of those trains. Pan Am's (pretty minor in comparison) derailment certainly didn't help, but they did run more after that, at least until a little after Megantic, then they stopped. But also, the demand for oil has gone down quite a bit too, I don't even think CN is handling much oil traffic these days, at least not to Saint John.

KSmitty wrote:
Intermodal is a potential game changer, but it has very little to do with the immediacy of this job. The Saint John Port expansion needs to be completed, and then SJ needs to land a big steamship line for it to be game changing. If/when that happens, it would be a huge boon to ST and CM&Q, but its not driving this tie job.

First I've heard of rail, be very interesting to see if it happens. A significant investment (rail) would indicate they plan to do more than maintain the status quo, and that they intend to run the Maine Central for a longer timeline. Ties/surfacing alone will not provide any large speed increases, and will obviously not indicate a long term timeline for operation (since they ran a tie job in 2012 and shuttered the line 2 years later).

Was the info of Saint John's Port Expansion discussed previous on the Board ? This CBC link is from July 2016.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-bruns ... -1.3696869" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Yes, extensively.

Cosakita18 wrote:Could this mean that PAR isn't happy with their CMQ haulage agreement?

They probably aren't and they definitely shouldn't be. A great deal of money is being lost and traffic is suffering, too. NBSR is also losing in the deal with traffic being down from the new routing. The only winner has been CMQ, despite losing a portion of their initial gains.

News release today, from the Port of Saint John.

http://www.sjport.com/port-saint-john-s ... ry-cranes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Video by drc930:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6jezXLqAo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Interesting to see NBSR cars being interchanged to SLR. One would never imagine that routing ...

Video by Maine Train Chaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6LLOG9FqT4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Like watching paint dry.

It's always interesting to see such old(er) technology still maintained and in use.

newpylong wrote:Like watching paint dry.

Who knows Newby.Maybe we'll look back on this someday and say "Was the railroad really in that bad shape?"

4 jobs up for bid

WA-3/4 Waterville to Keag and turn
MA-1/2 Keag to Waterville and turn

Assume the turn part is swapping trains in transit as they would never make it. Probably won't even make it one way.

So how soon will we be seeing these trains?

WOW. Never saw that one coming so soon.

Any idea what/how many days these jobs will run?

D