Dashing Thru The Snow
A massive snowstorm slammed the northeast Wednesday night into Thursday morning dumping one to two feet of snow and leading to major disruptions on the regions railroads. While some freight carriers ran like normal others such as the P&W cancelled all Wednesday night and Thursday morning road freights and locals. On the passenger side the MBTA kept running its already covid reduced schedule with some special snow buster sets clearing the routes in the early AM hours. Amtrak meanwhile preemptively cancelled all Acela service and ran only a few regional trains using three train sets out of Boston configured unusually like this.
Here is the first southbound of the day, train 171, racing through Cranston Yard near MP 180.3 already 40 min late. Behind the standard ACS64 electric is a P42 diesel that is online and doing all the work. You'll notice the photographs are both down on the electric so all it is doing is acting as a glorified cab car, not even pulling power from the wire for HEP. Why? Good question, and I'd honestly like to know the thinking behind this too!
Cranston, Rhode Island
Thursday December 17, 2020
Dashing Thru The Snow
A massive snowstorm slammed the northeast Wednesday night into Thursday morning dumping one to two feet of snow and leading to major disruptions on the regions railroads. While some freight carriers ran like normal others such as the P&W cancelled all Wednesday night and Thursday morning road freights and locals. On the passenger side the MBTA kept running its already covid reduced schedule with some special snow buster sets clearing the routes in the early AM hours. Amtrak meanwhile preemptively cancelled all Acela service and ran only a few regional trains using three train sets out of Boston configured unusually like this.
Here is the first southbound of the day, train 171, racing through Cranston Yard near MP 180.3 already 40 min late. Behind the standard ACS64 electric is a P42 diesel that is online and doing all the work. You'll notice the photographs are both down on the electric so all it is doing is acting as a glorified cab car, not even pulling power from the wire for HEP. Why? Good question, and I'd honestly like to know the thinking behind this too!
Cranston, Rhode Island
Thursday December 17, 2020