Canadian Railroads > More Transfer Trial and Tribulations

As I've posted in the recent past, CN has been trying to come up with a working plan after eliminating the road train into and out of Dartmouth, NS (408/407) each day.  This usually means that Dartmouth traffic comes in on 120 to Rockingham, and then a transfer takes the cars over to Dartmouth.  Depending on when the move has to be made, 505 (mornings) will do the job, or an extra 509 (afternoons) may be ordered instead.

At 08:12 on May 7th, train 505 was pouring it on near mile 9 in the rain to get a run on Bedford Hill.  Not content to merely have the crew handle the Dartmouth traffic, local management decided that 505 should also take 25 empty gons out to Milford to be loaded later that day.  The Dartmouth traffic consisted of propane and structural steel loads, along with empty scrap gons for the recyclers.

Not too surprisingly, they stalled on the 1.5% grade near mile 11.  505 called the Yard Coordinator, who assigned 507, which had just returned from downtown, to give them a push up the hill.  The timing couldn't have been worse, since the RTC was transferring to the next shift in the middle of all this.  More than an hour later, all the track warrants and other permissions were in place so 507 could move up behind the transfer to give them some help up the steepest part of the grade.  The second image shows them returning to Rockingham after cutting off just past signal 115.

The video shows the train once they got moving again on the grade.  CN doesn't seem to provision the engines with sand as a matter of policy, and the rain on this day didn't help matters any.  At least nothing caught on fire this time.

GTD

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Great Video !  Good to see and hear some older EMD 4 axles getting it done, especially without the benefit of sand.

So what is available there to sand the locomotives?
A sand tower or is it open a bag and pour?

PHall Wrote:
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> So what is available there to sand the
> locomotives?
> A sand tower or is it open a bag and pour?

A proper sand tower at the Fairview shop.  Brand new when they cleaned the place up and rebuilt everything in the late '90s.

Somebody who makes decisions has decided that locomotives will NOT be sanded.  I would guess that it's a money-saving decision.

GTD

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While it is beside the point of your photos, video & narrative, I really like seeing the SP gondola with its intact Sunset Route logo.

RuleG Wrote:
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> While it is beside the point of your photos, video
> & narrative, I really like seeing the SP gondola
> with its intact Sunset Route logo.

Me too.  I had seen it the day before in Rockingham Yard, and was pleased to see it was on the transfer too.  It made the edit a bit longer to include it, but I thought it added a little something.  At least it was in better shape than the MoPac gon next to it.

GTD