Eastern Railroad Discussion > fighting the Ice in KY

While the most of the Northeast got lots of snow, we got lots of ice here in Central KY. The railroad I work for (the Lexington & Ohio) got hit hard as ice covered trees fell by the hundreds across the tracks. We have spent the last Two days clearing the damage and still have a ways to go. Attached are Three digitals I shot yesterday while we worked near Lexington. The bad news is that they are calling for MORE ice tonight, adding to the 2 or 3 inches we already have...

E.M. Bell, KD4JSL
Salvisa, Ky

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Wow... that looks a lot like "the Ice Storm of \'98" that we had here in Maine. Many parts of the state had no electricity for almost 2 weeks. Hope you folks down there have better luck!

What time did this stuff start down there? My son and daughter-in-law were in Walton over the weekend. Guess I\'ll have to call to see how much trouble they had getting back to Evansville.
Hope you manage to get cleaned up and underway without too much loss.

WOW! No wonder the news reports are saying there are still many without power in that area. There was virtually no footage of this on the Cincy news stations. Pretty drmatic.

It\'s tried to give us some freezing rain here in SE Ohio, but nothing thankfully. All snow and sleet. Of course now, that depends on how close one starts getting to the Ohio. Many along the River are still without power.

Ahh, global warming in action. Gotta love it.

Think Safety!

-Chris B.

I\'ll take 4 feet of snow over 1 inch of ice anytime.

Right now there are almost 50,000 customers without electricity in Lexington and surrounding areas. No melting has occured so more trees are coming down and the power company isn\'t making any progress.

NS seems to be functioning fairly normally through town with generators at grade crossings, etc. Their rights of way are pretty well cleared and don\'t seem to have widespread problems relative to the magnitude of the storm.

CSX has very limited operations in Lexington and is trying to get the \'beltline\' that serves most of the industrial customers cleared. It was blocked by trees on Monday. I heard crews working on that most of the day Monday & yesterday. I think they\'ll get it cleared today and Y101 can probably work all the industries on it.

Problem is...the stuff\'s still falling, so until some melting occurs, no significant progress is coming! What a mess!

Hi,
What former railroad line is the Lexington and Ohio. I used to ride the George Washington through Lexington.

Amazing shots, hope you don\'t get as much ice tonight. I also remember the \'storm of the century\' in Jan 1998, I was without power for 16 days. The attached shot shows a CN M420 being used as a generator at the Boucherville,Que city hall. The unit was moved under its own power away from CN tracks; the army kept vigil while in the town. One of the last active M420\'s on CN, it was a hero and made all the local papers.

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I read about that. Didn\'t they just run it down the street to where they wanted?? Sorry, only Canadians would do that! haah : )

Is the CN unit in the background on rails...?

RW

The second unit was lifted off CN tracks (see the crossing just behind the engine) and left as a backup just in case. The active engine was in fact run to its position under its own power. How a flanged wheel doesn\'t go through asphalt I\'ll never know. Only in Canada, eh?