NEC fire last night....

Apparently last night around 7 or so, there was a fire on he NEC between Metuchen and Edison. Once I got home from one of my High School's basketball games, and a friend told me something was happening, I turned on my scanner. CETC-8 was having trains make reverse moves into Metuchen in order to drop passengers off, and then later, many trains (probably about 20, CETC-8 was getting pretty stressed, but, as always, maintained his cool) had recieved a TSRB addition, stating that all tracks between MP27 and MP28 would be open and have a restricting speed limit. About 10-15 minutes after that, a train at edison, and one south of New Brunswick, had lost power while on track 4. About 5 minutes after that the trains got power back, checked thier Pan's as suggested by CETC-8 and found nothing irregular. One o the trains mentioned that the fire was on the north side, a transformer fire, and somehow, the pole was on fire. I guess after that, eventually through the night things got back to normal. It sounded like there was some pretty bad delays.

I count myself lucky that I left earlier than I expected last night ... I was on train #3870, and passed by Metuchen at around 6:45/6:50ish. I had expected to take #3872, which would have gotten me stuck in that.

TAMR213 wrote:

One of the trains mentioned that the fire was on the north side, a transformer fire, and somehow, the pole was on fire.

That transformer fire was located on Talmadge Road in Edison right next to the right of way, The road was blocked off from Friday night all through Saturday. Due to the heavy rain and poor drainage and dropping temps, there was a nice sheet of ice causing someone to lose control and take out the pole.

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And $10 or $20,000 to be paid by the driver or his insurance for the damage to the pole. Hopefully there were no serious injuries.

Erik told me about this, any further info on it? I didnt see anything in the papers