THIS MONTH’S TOP NEWS STORIES AND PHOTOS Bangor & Aroostook Heritage
Maine’s classic Bangor & Aroostook Railroad slipped into the history books in 2003, but its colorful late-era image has been revived by successor Central Maine & Quebec Railway. The bold black, red, and gray has been applied to former Canadian Pacific “Red Barn” SD40-2F No. 9017. The railroad’s other nine units wear CMQ blue and gray, seen on No. 9022 easing the tribute unit out onto the transfer table at Derby, Maine, on November 8. See page 14 for details. PHOTO BY KEVIN BURKHOLDER
BNSF RAILWAY JONATHAN QUINLEY
Saginaw Yard Reopens BNSF plans to reopen Saginaw Yard
Fort Worth
in Fort Worth, Texas, as a switching yard; bids on the new jobs closed November 7. Yard jobs will be assigned at Saginaw with supervisors (assistant trainmasters or yardmasters) directing the movements in the yard. Regular switching operations at this facility shut down many years ago, and the remaining activity was limited to crews coming in from North Yard. Reopening Saginaw will free up space
in Alliance Yard for more intermodal and automotive block swaps. Many more autos are coming from Mexico in a Chrysler contract, which means more work for Alliance to get those cars on the right trains. Alliance also needs room to store intermodal baretables for different loading schedules. Currently these are sent to Purcell, Okla., and then brought back a day or two later to be
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loaded. Moving the manifest switching to Saginaw will allow Alliance the room to store some of these baretables, saving a 300-mile round-trip.
South Dakota Grain Trains
BNSF ran the first trains from a
new grain facility at Kennebec, S.D., at the end of October. The first was Train G-KBCTCA9-30, which ran from Kennebec to Trigo, Calif., with 114 loads of corn weighing 16,208 tons. Kennebec is a small town southeast of
Pierre, S.D., on the former Milwaukee Road. The track is operated by Dakota Southern and is owned by the state of South Dakota. The railroad recently had 41 miles of railroad between Chamberlin and Presho rehabilitated for heavy-haul, and the grain elevator is brand-new. The new Wheat Growers facility has storage capacity for over four million bushels of grain. The elevator also has a new loop track that was built just for this facility. The Dakota Southern interchanges with BNSF at Mitchell,
S.D., on the east side of the state. There are more grain-loading facilities
being built along BNSF mainlines as well. One is being built west of Wellington at Milan, Kan. The new elevator will have storage for seven million bushels of grain and will have a loop track for loading unit trains. The elevator is a 50/50 joint venture between Mid Kansas Coop and CHS, an energy, grains and foods company. This elevator should be ready for use by June 1, 2017.
Gimme Sugar
BNSF sent special Train O-TOPMGM1-31 from Topeka, Kan., to Montgomery, Ill., at the end of October for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new American Crystal Sugar storage facility. The $40 million facility will allow the sugar company to have storage closer to its Midwestern markets. It has a dome that stands 134 feet high and 183 feet wide to store up to 60,000 metric tons of sugar; the facility expects to transfer about twice that much to customers annually. BNSF will move boxcars
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