Tuesday’s trip retraced the route from Sunday for the first 35 miles to Ludlow, then continued on another 26 miles to just north of Bellows Falls. Once again, photo stops were held in each direction. To accommodate the various meetings that needed to be convention,
held during the Wednesday’s featured
attraction was a short morning trip to the Rutland Railroad Museum, located in the nearby village of Center Rutland. The museum is housed in a depot that had bay windows to serve both the Rutland and the Delaware & Hudson; this is now where VRS splits to go north to Burlington or west to Whitehall, N.Y., on VRS subsidiary Clarendon & Pittsford (the Ethan Allen Express route). While the former D&H is now the current C&P, the now-abandoned original C&P was also adjacent to the Center Rutland depot, just across the D&H tracks. Thursday’s trip headed north from
Rutland,
heading
to
Burlington,
Vt.
An optional side trip was offered to the Shelburne Museum in the town of the same name, although most riders stayed with the train all the way to Burlington. Another option was a tour of VRS’s primary locomotive shop, housed in the former Rutland roundhouse. Burlington proved to be a delightful town to visit, with good food and ice cream readily available.
Friday presented the rarest mileage of the convention, a trip up the two-mile branch to the Omya plant near Florence; Omya is a multi-national corporation with many products, and this plant crushes
marble to make calcium
carbonate. The two coaches and table car were bracketed by a VRS locomotive on each end as the train traveled the Burlington mainline to Florence, then reversed direction for the steep climb on the branch. To accommodate as many
people as possible, two different groups rode the train one way, with buses in the other. The folks at Omya rolled out the red carpet, allowing photos on plant property. While the first group was riding the train, the second group arrived at Omya by bus and established a photo line to get the train’s arrival. The groups then swapped, with the second group photographing the train departing before boarding the buses back to Rutland. No Rutland-based convention would be complete without hearing from the foremost historian of the region’s railroads; a standing-room-only crowd was on hand to hear Jim Shaughnessy’s presentation on Friday afternoon. The current state of the region’s railroads was the feature of a program by Jerome “Jerry” Hebda, retired vice president of VRS, at the Friday night banquet. Hebda detailed all aspects of the railroad’s
OPPOSITE:
The
southbound Vermont Rail
System Burlington-Rutland freight meets the northbound NRHS convention special at Char- lotte, Vt., on June 18. On the rear of the special is VRS observation car MacIntyre. LEFT: Sara- toga & North Creek BL2 No. 52 runs around the convention special at North Creek, N.Y., on June 15. BELOW: No. 52 leads the southbound NRHS special at Stony Creek, N.Y. The trip ran from Saratoga Springs to North Creek, with a connection to Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express be- tween Rutland and Saratoga Springs.
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