A Golden Oldie
Local job C777 works Supreme Oil in Englewood, N.J., at the north end of what remains in service of the former Erie Railroad Northern Branch on November 21. CSX SD40-2 No. 6063 provides the horsepower as it slightly leans to the side on the rickety old Erie stick rail. Sharp diesel spotters may recognize this unit was built for Chessie System’s Baltimore & Ohio as “GM50” and wore a special golden paint scheme to help EMD celebrate 50 years of making diesel locomotives. It was repainted in 1984 as B&O 4164, and later became CSX 6063.
PHOTO BY MICHAEL SULLIVAN
rationalization efforts. Mike Wheeler, chief operating officer, made mention of the West Virginia Secondary spinoff to Watco completed earlier in 2016, and then added that another such transaction was in process. Some transportation and Wall Street analysts had expected another route to the coalfields to be sold, but this was soon proven wrong. During November, the Delmarva Central Railroad Company (DCR) filed a Notice of Exemption with the Surface Transportation Board to lease and operate roughly 162 route miles of the NS Harrisburg Division in the Delmarva Peninsula region. This includes the Delmarva Secondary’s main route from Porter, Del., south to Pocomoke, Md. The lease also includes the Indian Secondary
River southward from
Harrington to Frankford, Del. In addition, DCR will assume operations on a number of industrial tracks, including the Oxford IT out of Clayton, Del.; the Cambridge IT out of Seaford, Del.; the Willards, Mardella, and Mill Street ITs out of Salisbury, Md.; and the Chrisfield IT out of Kings Creek, Md. DCR is a subsidiary of
Carload
Express Inc., the Oakmont, Pa.-based firm that also owns the Allegheny Valley, Southwest Pennsylvania, and Ohio Terminal railroads.
Operations
The final months of 2016 saw several changes to the carload, intermodal, and automotive network on NS. These include the addition of
Train 235
between Norfolk and the 47th Street terminal in Chicago. It supplements Train 233 (Norfolk–Landers Yard/
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Chicago), which also operates via the Heartland Corridor through Bluefield and Williamson,
W.Va., but only
Sunday–Friday. The new Train 235 is operating only on Saturdays as of late November. After a brief lapse off the schedules, Train 27R is once again operating between Buffalo, N.Y., and Toledo, Ohio. This train typically only operates Tuesday–Friday, with an early morning departure from Buffalo and a late afternoon arrival in Toledo. Three trains have also been
added or revised in the automotive network including Train 27A between Brunswick, Ga., and Vance, Ala. This train is designed to reposition empty multilevels from the Georgia Port Authority’s Colonel’s Island Terminal to the Mercedes Benz plant in Vance. Colonel’s Island ranks as the third- busiest dedicated RoRo (roll-on/roll-off) port facility in the U.S. for vehicle cargo, and second busiest for such imports. A pair of schedules have also been added between the Port of Charleston, S.C., and the BMW support yard in Greer, S.C. Train 27J operates from the port into Greer, and now runs daily instead of a couple of times per week. Daily counterpart Train 28J is new and handles multilevels with export BMWs destined to the port. Train 27J is usually a morning train out of Charleston, while Train 28J is an evening departure from Greer.
Schedules abolished include manifest Train 11T between Enola, Pa., and Elkhart, Ind. This had been a Thursday– Saturday schedule intended to cover the late week surge in carload traffic towards the Chicago gateway. Also cut was Train 380 from Bellevue, Ohio, east
to Williamson,
W.Va. Farther south, Train 129 has been eliminated between Chattanooga and Birmingham.
Locomotive Testing
NS began testing a pair of Progress Rail’s SD70ACe-T4 demonstrator units in Roanoke, Va., during early November. These emission-compliant locomotives, EMDX Nos. 1607 and 1608, are painted in Union Pacific yellow-and-gray for their planned post-testing sale to that railroad. However, they wear Electro- Motive lettering on the long hoods and EMD logos on the noses.
The trials are being conducted on
the Winston-Salem District’s Starkey Hill grade south of Roanoke, with NS’ Research Car No. 32 utilized to measure their performance on the test coal trains. In conjunction with these trials, NS has been testing SD70ACU units No. 7236 and No. 7234 on Starkey Hill. These are SD90MAC locomotives rebuilt for NS by Progress Rail at its Muncie, Ind., plant.
North Carolina Improvements During October, NS placed in service
a new section of double-track on its Piedmont Division mainline between Salisbury and Greensboro, N.C. The single-track
section eliminated was
between the south end of double-track at Bowers (mile 309.9) and the north end of double-track at Lake (mile 314.0). With this work, the Bowers control point was eliminated and Lake was relocated two miles northward. The new Lake features a new, high-speed universal crossover. This $44 million project, funded by NCDOT, began in August 2013 and
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