Portsmouth Branch Activity

Beautious!

Hopefully there's a tie job coming soon as well. Even from that height the splinters are easily visible.

They did 10,000 ties from Rockingham to Newington late summer and fall also some stone and surfacing.
They also had R.J. Corman change out 2 miles of rail up in Newington, they installed the rail they lifted from the passing siding at Rockingham which was much heavier.
Back in 2014 they did 5,000 ties and some surfacing also. Go back to pages 15 to 25 and you'll see photos I took of the 2014 rebuild.

MEC

Plenty of decent ties for the class of track that is - especially for Pan Am.

To the unprofessional, untrained eye like myself, I would say that track looks pretty damn good to me. There's one tie at the bottom of the picture, that looks like a stick of dynamite blew it to pieces but that's the only one.

What is the requirement for Class II track, one in five ties to keep gauge? Great picture of the track. It looked a lot better than I expected. Earlier on this thread I thought Pan Am was going to upgrade to Class III for the Sea 3 expansion.

Here is a video of DO-1 506-503 arriving in Portsmouth yard on Wednesday.

https://youtu.be/JWJldJZoTps

The Portsmouth Branch is never going to be Class III, unless someone else pays for it. All of this was paid for out of Pan Am’s pocket, and now it’s solidly Class 1 track. That’s all it needs to be.

Does anyone know how good a shape the trestle over Great Bay is? Last I saw the freight was crossing that section very slowly indeed.

codasd wrote: ↑Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:48 pm Earlier on this thread I thought Pan Am was going to upgrade to Class III for the Sea 3 expansion.

They said in the past that they were going to rehab the track to the equivalent of Class 2 standards but that they would continue to operate trains at Class 1 track speeds.

FRA class 1 track standard is not a maintenance standard, it is the minimum track safety standard for 10 mph operation. Hence track that is rehabbed to meet class 2 or 3 safety standards but operated at class 1 speeds makes long term safety and operating sense.

Those are one in the same - semantics.

Every class of track must meet the standards spelled out in FRA 49 CFR part 213, or they fall to the next class down (or lower)

Pan Am may have said they may maintain to Class 2 to appease the NIMBYs but will never operate at those speeds on the branch. I would doubt it is even up that standard currently.

The minimum safety standard is the bare bones that you can operate on. To keep a bare bones class one operable you have to be continually tweaking things just to make it safe and compliant and even then derailments can still occur. it's rope a dope railroading at its worst to maintain tracks to the minimum standard. real railroads fix it way above the required class because they don't like coming back every five minutes to regage or replace ties. and if you're hauling a lot of haz mat maintaining track above the fra class makes a lot of cents.

I got lucky and caught the local headed to Portsmouth yesterday. A pretty good string of cars, with one lumber, one box car, and about 8 propane. The old Stratham station looks pretty good with colors that are close to the old B&M style!

Great photo. I heard DO-1 at Rockingham from my house yesterday but was home with my kids so couldn’t catch it.

In case you or anyone is interested there are some recent video clips of DO-1 on my channel.

https://www.youtube.com/user/MayhewHD

Great photo. Would love to see more

Hey Jonathan, great clips! I will keep an eye on your page!

As an aside, I will bet that it was the same crew on the train that you caught...there is a bag hanging from the window on each photo...looks like they are keeping their lunch cool

Steve