The southbound Vermonter crawls into Palmer behind GE P42 #122 on Presidents Day 2009.
For the second year in a row, Tom and I spent Presidents Day at Palmer. Once again the action didn’t dissapoint, plus the weather was considerably better than the year before. While the morning was pretty dead, and we ended up spending most of the time hunting for lunch, the afternoon was much much more fruitful with numerous appearances by Amtrak and CSX, a couple of NECR trains and at the last possible second Mass Central or Finger Lakes or whatever it is that they are.
Having switched over to CSX trackage, the Vermonter highballs west towards Springfield now behind GE P42 #110.
This was also my first time trackside with the Nikon D70 I got a couple of weeks ago. It’s really a terrific camera that’s pretty easy to get the hang of. Not only did these photo’s turn out better than they would have coming from the old film camera, but I didn’t have to wait 3 months to get them developed. All in all, it was a very nice day to be trackside. I think this is definitely going to become a tradition. Anyway, the rest of the photo’s I took are below, coming up in the beginning of March will be a post about my trip home to Washington State last August.
NECR GP38 #3840, a former dual control unit (note the funky cab) of PRR heritage, pulls a string of freight cars across the CSX diamond and into NECR’s Palmer Yard.
A westbound CSX garbage train rumbles west across the diamond under the charge of somewhat new CSX GE ES44AC’s #945 and #949, pretty typical power for the B&A.
An eastbound CSX mixed freight takes the siding at Palmer for a meet with the westbound Lakeshore. It had a very long wait. In the lead is GE AC6000CW #5010 and another 6000 I can’t quite identify.
GE ES44AC #948 gallops westward with another ES44AC and two hoppers. This was a switch job out of West Springfield or a transfer run from somewhere. I forget the details. Either way though it’s probably my favorite photo of the day. Well lit and everything, albeit a little boring.
NECR GP38’s #3849 & #3851 and their single car train head north into Palmer Yard at the Hospital Rd. crossing.
Mass Central GP9’s #1729 & #960 push and pull a transfer job into the CSX yard. They had to scramble to get out of the way of the northbound Vermonter.
This photo is actually from the week before whne we rather fruitlessly searched the valley for any sort of railroad action, and this was the best we could find, as the light was fading to boot. I like it though, it looks really cold, even though it wasn’t really that bad.
Chris
MILEPOST 15 
Looks like a very enjoyable hunt their,
I really like to look at the trackside delights in some of the pics too.
Nice shot of the 3840. I am not sure about the units heritage, but there are no dual controls inside. There is just the regular control stand on the Right side. I get to run this unit every few weeks when it gets down here
Brian
NECR
Hi Brian, thanks for the update. Perhaps the second control stand was removed when it had dynamic brakes added.
According to what I could find, this was originally PRR 7904, then CR 7904, though that could be a mistake as it might have been one of the PRSL dual-control units.