Eastern Railroad Discussion > The Blue Ridge Southern roller coaster

It's the newest shortline railroad in North Carolina, but parts of it could definitely look more like a hill you'd see in a theme park than on an active railroad. With its brace of nicely painted Watco SD40M-2s it makes for a fun chase. This particular one occurred in late October on a beautiful Sunday.

1) The T31 Canton to Asheville local run makes up its train at Evergreen Packing in Canton.

2) T31 from the backyard of a very friendly local resident near Candler.

3) Eastbound outside of Asheville with a hogback that would be hellacious in a speeder car.

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4) Westbound on the return trip from Asheville as they pass through the Candler area.

5) Wide open with the only 30 car train, believe it or not. What a hill!

6) Back home in Canton, the crew begins to break down the inbound train.

That's all.


SH

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Badass series thanks for posting!
Mark Mautner

I miss the former SD45s, these are great, thanks!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/14 20:37 by NH2006.

Very nice series. Thank you for sharing your day.
John

Nice shots Scott! Pretty sharp looking operation too.

Posted from iPhone

What a nice series of photos, good work covering that newer operation.
RAD

Top notch series! Great stuff - thanks for posting.

Michael

is the reason NS dumped this line because the maintenance costs outweigh the revenue ...

Posted from Android

Suspect it had more to do with labor costs in the short run. The really tough grades are west of Canton.

Looks like a great day. Great bunch.
JB

VERY NICE...!!! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the kind words folks. Last I heard the T31 was running 7 days a week. Hard to beat that for shortline railfanning.


SH

Business is real good. BLU has picked up business that NS either didn't care about or what they let slide. A lot of days now T31 is making 2 roundtrips to AVL and back to Canton. T33 also comes in for the second shift, but as far as I know they are only making one roundtrip a night.
W44 on the "Saluda Line" to Hendersonville is doing quite well also. They have an office in Arden (just south of AVL)and work in the evenings going on duty around 5-6ish. The power is parked at the office. They bring in the cut from the previous night to AVL Yard and pick up that nights cars and then head south. There are several industrial parks that they service down towards Hendersonville.
There is also the DUKE Skyland Power Plant that gets 1-2 trains a week on average. BLU pulls out the empties with their GP39-2s since it is basically down hill to the Yard. They use NS power to take the loads to the plant in 2 44-50 car cuts just the way NS did it. It is a fairly good grade most of the way to the Plant. It's only about 8-9 miles, but the first 5 miles is coming out of French Broad/Swannanoa River valley when the AVL Yard is.

Mike

PS Very nice shots. I've trying to catch different power variations. They do swap the power around a little, but not much. Most days T31 runs with 4 SD's, sometimes only 3. Of the 6 big SD's 3 face east and 3 face west. Most of the time lately they use the SD45 bodied units and the 2 SD40-2s stay in Canton. They now do switching at the Paper Mill now, so the 4116 and 4205 have been handling those chores.

To revive an old thread... Duke Energy announced this week that the Skyland coal plant will close by 2020.