Questions about PAR (Springfield Terminal) in Waterbury, CT

After finally, for the first time since being employed by MNR almost 7 years ago, I had a chance to visit Waterbury, and while the yard adjacent to Waterbury Station is quite derelict, just wanted to know how often does PAR Springfield Terminal visit Waterbury??? If it does, are there any daytime runs that could be photographed by the Waterbury Station??? How often does PAR/ST come thru?? I plan to finally get up here both as being qualified on the Waterbury, and also in interest of railfanning the Waterbury Branch. Any information is welcomed and appreciated!! Thanks, folks!!

They go to Waterbury via the length of the Highland once or twice a week on a regular schedule and work whatever's left in the area. Waterbury yard is unused because on-line business on the branch has been pretty thoroughly "Guilforded" away from neglect over the years. They've consolidated pretty much all yard ops in CT to tiny but ever-active Plainville yard and run from there since it's got container transloading cranes set up. I don't think there's any freight running north to Torrington anymore unless they've got a couple customers in hibernation who might take deliveries on yearly timescales.

If you are thinking of this piece of equipment:
http://photos.greatrails.net/s/?p=131580

I think it was only used to load/unload steel by a former customer. No transloading in Plainville that I know of.

Freight service is available between Waterbury and Torrington on the Naugatuck Railroad. Unfortunately at present there are no regular customers on that line but that doesn't mean that there won't be sometime down the road.
As for the rest of Waterbury, what you see remaining around the station is/was the old "High Grade Yard". There was also a "Low Grade Yard which went down toward the freight house (still standing on Freight Street) where there was much industrial work at one time.
When I first started on the New Haven back in 1956 Waterbury was pretty much a 24/7 operation with yard jobs on all three tricks, locals north, east and south, yard jobs with 0900 class S-1's, two through freight trains between Waterbury and Cedar Hill and an occasional Hartford - Maybrook extra. The regular Maybrook jobs through Waterbury were a victim of the 1955 floods and were never restored. Close to where the Metro-North Waterbury Branch crosses the Naugatuck River was Bank Street Junction which was a 24/7 signal station (SS-202) and between that point and Waterbury was still two tracks with ABS rules plus the Winsted Main.
At the time before the floods, Waterbury also had a through train 7 days a week between New York and Winsted, two through trains between Waterbury and Boston and lots more as well. I still have memories and a lot of paper records of this activity.
Waterbury is a sad case like a number of other cities in the north east, a story of what once was but is gone and will likely never again return. I think it is a wonder that PanAM still operates there at all.
Noel Weaver

Sad what's happened to their presence in CT. Purchasing all those lines in the late-70's was the shot in the arm that got B&M out of bankruptcy and allowed the Guilford sale to happen. They raked in healthy profits in "freight-dead" Connecticut and really turned things around for themselves. The Highland's still doing pretty well, but they let everything on the southern half of the Springfield line and a majority of the Waterbury branch go to spit. Canal line swung from very active through the early-90's to Southington, Cheshire, and everything but 1-1/2 miles south of Plainville yard being completely abandoned. And Housatonic's doing almost nothing with the scraps Guilford shed off to on the now mostly out-of-service Maybrook line.

Can't help but think that a more aggressive local carrier like CSO would do much better if they took over the rest of PAR's trackage rights. They've done a great job signing on new business on the Armory and Griffin Lines, enough that the state's paying for some pretty robust track improvements on those two lines. PAR's lines, even at current modest service levels, are much more right-sized for a carrier like that. PAR only has something like 3 cab signaled locos left in-service that let them get south of Springfield to the junction in Berlin (the only cabbed territory all of PAR runs in), so that's a big reason why they're so parsimonious with their schedules. It also cuts against their corporate consolidation back to the mainline, PAS, and the big interchange branches to go so far out of the way for strictly locals and to still outright own the Highland while dumping nearly every other non-critical branchline. I don't know what their strategic justification is for still running down there, but they've been sticking their noses in the whole New Britain busway fight with wooing of the state with (suspiciously) cheap quotes for upgrading the Highland for passenger service. That's a telltale sign that they're probably jockeying to sell that line to the state soon as a long-term passenger hold; it's the longest non-gov't owned line in the state save for the heavy-use P&W and NECR mains. Whether that'll also entail bailing out of freight rights to a CSO or P&W is anybody's guess.

I am pretty much a non practicing railfan but when I was chasing trains more actively in the early 90's the 'PLED - EDPL' train was a three times a week round trip, and I think Guilford kept a engine and presumably one crew in CT.

When did the CT local job end?

EWJ

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote: Can't help but think that a more aggressive local carrier like CSO would do much better if they took over the rest of PAR's trackage rights. They've done a great job signing on new business on the Armory and Griffin Lines, enough that the state's paying for some pretty robust track improvements on those two lines.

Do you mean Central New England Railroad? They run the line from Hartford to Griffins and the Amory Branch north of East Windsor Hill.

Thanks all for the information!!! From the looks of things, if I shoot the Waterbury Branch, I better stick to my employer's trains, seemingly freights are out of the equation, and from some of the responses, I totally understand why. Thank you all, folks!! Would have been nice to catch an old GP in the Guilford scheme or maybe even get lucky and catch one of the Pan Am schemes, with the original air line logo or even the new black scheme.

Well, you have a 50/50 chance. Of the 4 locomotives that are cab-signalled, 2 are in the new Pan Am scheme and 2 are still in GRS. Very rare to have any than one of these four down there (though this recently happened).

I know this is an older thread but I figured this was the best place to post comment. It appears that the deerfield crew is now doing roughly two trips to plainville on a weekly basis. There has been at least one locomotive in plainville yard for the past 4-6 months. When driving over the rail yard yesterday evening there was one train pulling into the uard which had two locomotives and there were already two locomotives parked in the yard. The train coming in had new panam color scheme with the locomotives parked in the yard had the old guilford schemes. Again not sure if the inbound train was deerfield crew or if it was Pl1 returning from deerfield.

PL1 is based at Plainville CT and generally works Tu-Sa. It rarely works as far east as New Britain and Berlin, usually sticks to Plainville to Southington on the Canal Line, Plainville to Bristol on the Highland, then Plainville to Waterbury once a week, on rare occasions south of Waterbury to Seymour. I think Waterbury is usually done on Fridays.
IIRC EDPL/PLED is crewed from ED and usually works 3 days southbound from ED and departs PL the day after arrival. Days of operation vary, and operations usually take place over night to avoid congestion on the Conn River and Amtrak.

I know there's always a ton of talk in CT about the potential for new customers on the Waterbury Branch since it's one of the few still primarily-industrial areas of the state without much in the way of NIMBY encroachment, and there's a lot of cheap land and buildings to be had for companies being priced out of the Shoreline towns. Has there been any uptick in chatter about potential new customers...even ones just making inquiries about the real estate and potential PAS services at those sites?

It's nice Plainville's getting more activity, but there's still not a lot of evidence that the new "chase every carload" era extends to the bigger-picture focused PAS/NS side of the network. Are they really taking a second look at the few true branchlines left on west-of-Ayer side of the system, or is this still seen as an inconvenient permanent backwater by the NS side of the partnership? If that's still more-or-less the case they've probably got more money to be made dishing the off-Springfield Line traffic to CSO and letting them deliver between New Britain and Derby with the goods run only to Hartford as bridge traffic (or...better yet, negotiating with MA and its new Conn River public ownership to let CSO run overhead to East Deerfield and its G&W sibling NECR, provided there's toothy concessions for CSO to not let other RR's vulture the originating PAS traffic).