Arriving at Sangerfield, as far south as they run on the Utica Branch, although the line is intact all the way down to Chenango Forks. They set out the tank car for Carovail and then ran Long Hood Forward back to Utica. I tried to chase them back, but they got ahead of me without me realizing it and I never caught back up.
Just a safety reminder in the wake of an accident that killed two Union Pacific crew members, injured three, and caused millions in equipment and property damage this week in Pecos, Texas.
If you are stuck on a grade crossing, or see someone stuck on a crossing CALL THE NUMBER ON THE BLUE SIGN AT THE CROSSING. Get out of the vehicle immediately. Find the blue sign on the crossing and call the emergency number. DO NOT CALL 911 FIRST! AGAIN call the number on the blue sign FIRST. In this situation every second counts and 911 can't help you fast enough.
They look like this, and have the phone number, crossing number and railroad name. It will immediately put you in touch with a railroad dispatcher who will immediately halt any moves coming that way. The truck was stuck on the crossing for nearly an hour before it was hit, and nobody called the number to let UP know. The low-boy truck with an oversize load shouldn't have been there to begin with, a proper route planning would have had them avoid that crossing and a pilot vehicle that was actually doing it's job would have warned them off before they got hung up on the crossing (there was a pilot vehicle, and even police Ford Econoboxs, but they clearly didn't alert them), and then they called 911, but neither they, nor 911, nor even their police Ford Econoboxs, called Union Pacific to alert them. And now two people are dead because of it.
Honestly, just staggering amounts of incompetence with that situation. According to locals, that crossing is a notorious trouble spot, with warning signs. Any pre-planning inspection should have caught it. The pilot vehicle should have caught it. The truck driver, upon approaching, should have seen it and stopped. The police Ford Econobox should have known to call the railroad. And the fact that it was stuck there for nearly an hour and no one made that call is just absurd. Gross negligence all the way around.
So this summer CalTrain went fully electric with new Stadler KISS trainsets, retiring their old F40PHs and cool stainless-steel doubledecker gallery cars. The move was done through a California state grant, which as part of a "decarbonization effort" required that the prime mover be disabled per terms of the grant. They could only be put back in service if upgraded to Tier 4 emissions compliance. For a while, they were even offered on CalTrain's merch store website.
Recently it was announced that the 645 prime movers won't be disabled, because they have made an agreement to send 19 of the locomotives and 90 gallery commuter cars to Lima, Peru, for some $6 million, a deal which involved CalTrain, the US State Department, Department of Commerce, and Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Lima expressed its interest in buying the equipment, which led to the agreement and the Air Quality Management District has provided a waiver allowing the locomotives to continue in operation rather than being scrapped, a standard requirement for funding toward new equipment.
Now, I'll try not to get political, but California politicians just really do not live in the real world, do they? A senator is now bringing forth a lawsuit to try and block all similar future sales. His argument is that selling the equipment to Peru and allowing it to run as-is is not eliminating pollution, but just moving pollution elsewhere. But what he's ignoring, is that while F40PHs may not be perfectly green, they are greener alternatives to the current car-heavy commutes in Lima. A US State Department study said the process would remove 20,000 metric tons of pollution from the air, take 4,000 cars off the road, and generate 150,000 to 250,000 passenger trips on weekdays. It's cleaner than cars, and the stuff already exists, so there isn't the pollution from manufacturing new equipment.
The new Stadler KISS trainsets that CalTrain is using. They're not as ugly as the junk coming out of Siemens, but I still like F40PHs with stainless-steel gallery cars.
How/why did this thread suddenly become a sticky in the Off-Topic section?
In reply to NickD :
Idk but I'm glad it did. This is the first one I always look for.
In reply to NickD :
Must have been the public service announcement about the crossing, just so everyone reads it.???????
In reply to NickD :
I loved the story on the NYO&W. I work right on that train line. You saw my company when you took pics of the train in people's front yards in Clayville. I see that train go by 2x per day from my office. I also follow that line from Clayville to the crossing of Route 5/8 everyday. It's pretty cool to watch.
A little unexpected catch In Kitchener yesterday as I had only stopped at the station to get out of the cold and ended up catching CN 568 with BNSF 2090 on the head end waiting for a late running Via train 84 to clear before they headed west to Stratford Ontario. 
In reply to NY Nick :
Pratt & Whitney, I'm guessing?
I really wanted to get a photo at Richfield Junction, where the Richfield Springs branch split off at Cassville to head east to Richfield Springs, but I couldn't figure out where to park, and it would have been a hike to get there. At the speeds they were moving, they probably would have passed by before I could get back in there.
The Richfield Springs branch was yanked up in 1995, other than the junction with an (out of service) wye and about 3900 feet of track that continues dead south to just north of Babcock Hill Road. That was left in place for an operation that was loading stone there, and once that ended, it's been occasionally used for car storage.
When the Utica, Chenango & Susquehanna Valley, as the DL&W was originally known, was chartered, it's goal was to bring cheap anthracite from Pennsylvania to Utica. There wasn't really a consensus on how exactly to do that, particularly which coal company to partner with. You had the Lackawanna Coal & Iron Co. of Scranton and the Delaware & Hudson Canal Co. as the two big players, and they were both in the railroad business; the Lackawanna with the Lackawanna & Western Railroad (later the DL&W) and the D&H Canal Co. with the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad (later the D&H).
The plan became to begin construction south out of Utica to Cassville, since residents in the Chenango Valley could use the railroad, especially with the Chenango Canal having imploded, and then during the construction begin conversation with the two coal companies about which one to bond themselves to and lease the railroad to. If they went with the Lackawanna Coal Company, they would continue south to Binghamton. If they went with the D&H, they'd build southeast and meet them at Oneonta. They went with the Lackawanna and so went south, but built the Richfield Springs Branch to reach the resorts as Richfield Springs, but if they had paired with the D&H, they would have continued on southeast to Oneonta, and the Rondout & Oswego, which became the west end of the Ulster & Delaware, would have been a link in the chain as well. The Richfield Springs Branch also interchanged with the Unadilla Valley Railway at Bridgewater, and the UV interchanged with the NYO&W at New Berlin. The story goes that while there was some professional friction between the NYO&W and DL&W guys (a lot of NYO&W Utica Branch guys were hired on by the DL&W after '57), employees of both disliked the Unadilla Valley crews. The DL&W guys were very professional and by the books, and the O&W guys wern't unsafe but they were a little more seat-of-the-pants. But the UV crews were known to cut corners and skirt safety rules. For example, despite an almost-barren timetable, the UV still somehow managed to have a cornfield meet between their doodlebug and a freight train, which so impressed the ICC that they ordered the UV to cease all passenger operations.
Lucius Beebe's Mixed Train Daily recounts a tale of when the opera first came to New Berlin. Big deal in those days. In preparation, all the men and women of New Berlin took the train up to Utica to buy new dresses and hats and jackets and get their hair done. Everyone was at the opera house and seated and the curtains were supposed to rise at 7:30. Nothing. Then 8:00, then 8:30, then 9:00, then 9:30, and finally at 9:45 the troupe comes rushing into the opera hll. Turned out that someone at the NYO&W had convinced the opera troupe to travel by their rails, to which the locals all responded "If they'd taken the Lackawanna and the Unadilla, they'd have been here on time." From then on, the town of New Berlin swore not to do anymore business with the NYO&W, and they traveled and sent as much traffic over the Unadilla and the DL&W as they possibly could.
In a similar manner as New Berlin, the town of Norwich was served by both the NYO&W and the DL&W, and it was always said that "The NYO&W had Norwich's heart, but the DL&W go it's business." The NYO&W had a huge presence in downtown Norwich, with a yard and engine facilities, while the DL&W just passed through. But the DL&W, despite it's smaller presence, got more traffic from Norwich. And when the NYO&W went under in '57, the DL&W even took what traffic the NYO&W had once had.
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Norwich was also the site of a particularly obscure part of the NYO&W, well, rather the New York & Oswego Midland, system that I only learned about recently in Doug Ellison's (terrific) book on the DL&W Utica Branch. The New York & Oswego Midland was built with the idea to funnel ship traffic from the port at Oswego to New York City ports, gambling on the construction of the Niagara Ship Canal being built in the near future and making Oswego a more vital port than Buffalo.
As the NY&OM went into service, it became clear that the Niagara Ship Canal wasn't going to be built anytime soon and that ships weren't going to be headed to Oswego, the NY&OM began looking for a western outlet. At Norwich, they split off a line that headed west, with hopes of reaching Buffalo. Initially this was referred to as the Western Extension or the Auburn Branch, with the Buffalo not being bandied around publicly. At the time the line was frequently referred to as the Deruyter Branch as probably not too many people thought it would go to Auburn, and in fact never did. The map shows the full-length of the line from where it splits off at Norwich and heads north east highlighted in dark green.
This line meandered out of Norwich and up a 2%+ grade over Crumb Hill near Otselic Center east of Deruyter. It then went through Cortland, and used trackage rights over the Utica, Ithaca & Elmira Railroad (later part of the Lehigh Valley) from Cortland to Freeville. From there, it turned north towards Genoa, NY before finally running out of steam at Scipio Center, 15 miles south of Auburn. A very roundabout route, as per usual for the Midland, and they made sure to hit every mountain, hill, gorge and curve they could find while missing most major cities. Dewitt Littlejohn was a bit of a shyster, and he used the Town Bonding Act to finance his railroads, at the result of having to hit every middle-of-nowhere town between terminuses, while missing every major city. He also thought that following rivers or valleys or going around hills was a folly that added extra mileage, and he proudly proclaimed that the railroad would "be built at right angles to the mountains", which would result in shorter point-to-point distances. He failed to consider that it also meant lots of grades, tunnels and bridges.
On January 1, 1873, a newspaper correspondent boasted that the Midland "is now running regular passenger and freight trains from the City of Utica to the village of Scipio Center, a distance of 135 miles." From there, stagecoach service was provided into Auburn, some 15 miles to the north. On August 19, 1873, the Midland advertised two trains a day on the Auburn branch; one express and one mixed. Running time for the express train between Norwich and Scipio was four hours; the mixed, six hours and twenty minutes. Trains were met at Sicpio by John Snyder's stage for service to Auburn. Littlejohn and the directors seemingly realized that the line to Auburn was not a real viable outlet west and had conceived an "Air Line" west from the Hancock, NY area via Deposit that magically reached west in a more direct line. There were several rough maps and some surveys recorded but I don't know to what extent or what might have been filed.
In the end it was all an unattainable dream, Littlejohn "left for other interests", Midland management, apparently thinking an express train on the Auburn branch was superfluous, removed it in November and service was cut to one train a week from Cortland to Scipio going west Wednesday and returning Thursday. The New York & Oswego Midland went bankrupt and a receiver was appointed in 1873. An agreement was worked out with the Utica, Ithaca & Elmira Railroad to operate the Freeville-to-Scipio segment, and on October 6, 1874, after nearly a year of erratic service, the Cortland Standard reported that the UI&E "has made arrangements to run the Midland from Cortland to DeRuyter, giving the public two trains daily each way."
Finally, Receiver Abram S. Hewitt found it necessary to suspend operations on the entire Midland system, as of midnight, Saturday, Feb. 27, 1875, "in consequence of the levies being made by tax collectors upon the property of its shippers, as well as the unwarranted seizure of so large of an amount of its rolling stock and the consequent cessation of shipments and travel..." Nothing moved on the Auburn Branch until April 6th. As stated earlier, the Auburn branch was now being operated by the UI&E. About a month later, the UI&-E made an offer to purchase the branch. The president of the road proposed, however, to take up rails from DeRuyter to the trestle at Otsellc and use the rails to connect with the Syracuse & Chenango Valley Railroad at Georgetown. He, ‘naturally, wanted to abandon the trestles. The scheme met with general disfavor and never materialized, although the UI&E continued to operate the Auburn branch until May 1st, 1876. From Norwich to DeRuyter was dismantled in 1882. The 19.5 miles from DeRuyter to Cortland was preserved through leases until it was purchased outright by the Elmira, Cortland & Northern Railroad, which was the immediate antecedent of the Lehigh Valley. The so-called "western extension" between Freeville and Scipio Summit was operated under lease by the UI&E between 1873 and 1876 when it was sold to the newly-organized Ithaca, Auburn & Western. This line was extended to Auburn in 1889, but only lasted three years, and was abandoned in 1891. The NY&OM was reorganized as the NYO&W in 1880, and they abandoned the western expansion and instead very wisely tapped the anthracite fields in the Lackawanna Valley / Scranton area. A better move at the time and circumstance than trying to reach Buffalo.
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