They had either four or five units coming out of Saint John, so there could be a 907 today. Somewhere there is a backlog of log cars, unfortunately with the McAdam cam not facing the track I don't know if they are all at McAdam or not.
EMR is preparing to do 10,000 ties on curves and bridge approaches from Vanceboro to Brownville Jct this fall. The tie crew finished work between Millinocket and Oakfield and may have gone all the way to Squapan, over the last few months. They also sent some equipment down to Woodland to do a tie job down there, including work to rebuild a switch and a track which were damaged in a derailment a few weeks ago.
For those not on social media the remaining SD40-2's, 6315, 6319, 6340, 8144, and 8145 (formerly 6304) have been sold and shipped out to K&K Recycling. To my knowledge 8145 and 6315 still ran, and the other three had been sitting for maybe a year or two. So there is a chance those might get resold later on. 6200, 6318, and 6332 have or will be scrapped if they haven't been already. 6200 went out bout this time three years ago with a bad generator, 6318 went out around the same time with several issues including a radiator leak. They might have pulled parts off of it to fix 6319 back up during the locomotive crunch in 2022. 6332 lost it's crankshaft in the fall of 2020, shortly after it had major mechanical work or a rebuild done and eventually was used for parts.
While off topic somewhat, trackwork on MNR is still well underway. They have dumped ballast between Millinocket and Oakfield and had a Herzog train parked in the yard when I was up this weekend. Presumably this is for north of Oakfield. The surfacing crew is working out of Island Falls and the track looks pretty good. It looks like they replaced rail on the curves between Island Falls and Oakfield recently, but I am not sure if that was done this year or last. The rail gang is now parked up in Fort Kent, not sure if they are working north or south. There is a 10 MPH speed restriction from Siberia to somewhere between Stacyville and Grindstone. Its a guess on my part, but my guess is it will be removed once the surfacing work finishes up.
The box culvert replacement at Oakfield is now done and the yard tracks are all either in service again or will be soon.
On the Van Buren Sub, it looks like they recently did some tie work, but it could be from years past since the only time I have chased 520/521 is in the winter. In the last two years MNR has redone the yard up there with 115LBS rail and switches as well as installing a second track for Lajoie Growers which is where the potato cars were coming from. They also receive tank cars of something there my guess is some type of fertilizer.
On Monday 520 was busy, they pulled a few empty center beams from CN, 7 Irving loads from the transload along with one car of Lebel lumber. They spotted two tanks for Lajoie, and took a healthy cut of chip empties and log loads over to the Irving mill. The return trip had somewhere between 40 and 50 chip loads with 20+ being sent out on 521 and the rest being set off for the trip on Tuesday. I only saw a few cars stored in the sidings between Madawaska and Squapan. There were some high cubes at Frenchville and a cut of loaded chip cars and a handful of log cars at Ashland.
It's also worth mentioning that the recently acquired chip cars of SOU/NS heritage are now being used. I saw 5 of them while I was up this weekend.
901? had 50-60 cars both days I chased on Saturday and Monday. It appears they are now a Oakfield-Millinocket turn and 503 has been reinstated as the Oakfield-Squapan turn.
