Trains on CSX St. Lawrence Sub (CR's Montreal Secondary)

They have rail laid out through Potsdam for track work I noticed today.

Leo_Ames wrote:They have rail laid out through Potsdam for track work I noticed today.

Noticed the Q152 more in the evening and not much traffic during the day. Work gang working at mp48 just north of lacona.

Empty tie train headed south through Evans Mills about 1130 today. An engine on each end and a crawler with claw at one end, on a flat car, with ramp to mount the tie gons.

tree68 wrote:Empty tie train headed south through Evans Mills about 1130 today. An engine on each end and a crawler with claw at one end, on a flat car, with ramp to mount the tie gons.

Just south of Lacona a rail gang put in some new rail around mp45. Lots of trains at night also.

They seem to be doing some work around Adams, a northbound today went up at a crawl and I saw a couple big trucks head south one with a section of panel track on the back.

Sand Street crossing in Philly closed until Thursday per announcement on fire department radio.

At work, during a recent 911 call in the Massena area, the 911 map showed the CSX trackage coming
into the Massena Yard from the South. It also showed a "wye" present roughly adjacent to the Hough
Road area of Massena Springs. Is that "wye" still present, and if so, does CSX still use it? How big is/was
this "wye" in capacity? How far back does this "wye" date, does it go back to NYC days? I do not
have access to any of the Google Earth / map systems. Thanks in advance.

Bigt: Try http://mapper.acme.com/

The wye is here: N 44.90759 W 74.89341

I'm not up in that area, so I can only go by what I see on Acme Mapper - the wye had a pretty long tail track, although it doesn't look like it's all active any more. Looks like there's still track on the ground.

The topo map on Acme Mapper shows the owner as NYC, and the line between Massena and Fort Covington as Grand Trunk.

As always, I recommend that you look on http://OpenStreetMap.org if you want to know where tracks went and go.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/62644388 shows the curved tail of the wye and how far it goes. The rails go as far as depicted on the map, and I saw no evidence that they ever went further. The rails are indeed still there. The disused portion of the tail track is 124 meters long. The non-rusty portion of the tail track is 116 meters. They could probably clear some brush and get another car-length, but I'd guess that they only need to turn one engine at a time. The wye isn't there on the 1909 USGS Topo map, but is there on the 1970 map.

The enclosed photo shows the straight section of the disused portion of the tail track. You can see the cleared brush of the active section at the very end, and my bicycle about halfway down.

The wye is there in an aerial shot from 1963. And it's there on a 1943 topographical map.

With the local topographical maps scanned into the HistoricAerials site, sometimes features like this are left off and sometimes they're not. Several things like wyes I've noticed will be absent in several earlier maps, appear in another, and then disappear again in later maps. The Watertown, NY roundhouse for instance is a more significant example of a feature that they usually would leave off.

Piles of new ties all through JeffCo now, and I saw a CSX hi-rail dumptruck with a tarp-covered load on the streets of Watertown today.

It was announced on the county fire radio that CSX was replacing rail in the Antwerp area.

Busy, busy!

Then they still use the "wye" at Massena....given the statement of "the non-rusty" portion?
Would there still be a need to turn a diesel every now and then? From the looks in the photo
that Russ provided, I would say moving anything on it would be risky!

Like Russ already said, that's the non cleared portion of it that clearly hasn't been used in quite a few years. Most of it seems to be perfectly fine and able to handle the job it would appear.

http://binged.it/18BphVC

Would the long out of service part have ever been used to wye a small passenger train back in the days when there was through passenger service on the line? There must be about 700' there after the switch. As a portion of it being out of service shows, it's far longer than it needs to be even to turn a MU diesel consist let alone to turn a single steam locomotive like a 2-8-2 which would've been common in its earlier days.

I think the clear portion is still long enough to turn an MU diesel consist. The question in my mind is not why it's so short, but why it was ever that long?

Oh, speaking of wyes, remember back to the 1890's, when the Potsdam and Watertown Railroad only ran between Potsdam (Junction, aka Norwood now) and Watertown? They must have had some way to turn trains, and I think this wye is it: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/793898890 . The tail track is only 59 meters long. Compare that to the Norwood & St. Lawrence Railroad's wye, with a tail track of 79.3 meters in Norwood and 62 meters in Waddington. Wye is the Massena tail track 240 meters long?? (get it, "Wye"??)

(Just so we're talking about the same thing, by "tail track" I mean the switchable length of the track past the points of the switch).

I'd opine that Massena needed a longer tail track to turn full trains (passenger, that is) to save the hassle of breaking the train, turning the loco, then putting the train back together. I'm thinking that most trains on the line terminated at Massena, then headed back for Syracuse.