Second To Last
Just another from my favorite shots of 2018 file that I am finally sharing.
In early 2018 Pan Am railways attempted to serve a long dormant customer located in Somerville, MA adjacent the skeletal remains of what was once the massive Boston & Maine Railroad yard and shop complex in their namesake city. Now what remains is 99.9% the domain of passenger trains and B&M successor PAR bases only one lonely switch engine in the city. I was very fortunate to catch a few of these very rare moves on this obscure bit of trackage. Here we see MEC 345 backing gingerly out of the spur from Boston Paperboard heading back toward the old Yard 10 lead. They had just attempted to spot two loads which derailed on the curve leading to the warehouse. These derailed cars would sit for over a month and never actually get spotted. Eventually they would be rerailed, pulled out, and shipped away somewhere ending their experiment of using rail service again. So this image is the second to last train on the rails...I wasn't able to shoot the final move when the cars were pulled.
To learn more about this Last Freight Train in Boston check out my article in the May 2019 issue of Railfan & Railroad magazine.
Somerville, Massachusetts
Thursday June 14, 2018
Second To Last
Just another from my favorite shots of 2018 file that I am finally sharing.
In early 2018 Pan Am railways attempted to serve a long dormant customer located in Somerville, MA adjacent the skeletal remains of what was once the massive Boston & Maine Railroad yard and shop complex in their namesake city. Now what remains is 99.9% the domain of passenger trains and B&M successor PAR bases only one lonely switch engine in the city. I was very fortunate to catch a few of these very rare moves on this obscure bit of trackage. Here we see MEC 345 backing gingerly out of the spur from Boston Paperboard heading back toward the old Yard 10 lead. They had just attempted to spot two loads which derailed on the curve leading to the warehouse. These derailed cars would sit for over a month and never actually get spotted. Eventually they would be rerailed, pulled out, and shipped away somewhere ending their experiment of using rail service again. So this image is the second to last train on the rails...I wasn't able to shoot the final move when the cars were pulled.
To learn more about this Last Freight Train in Boston check out my article in the May 2019 issue of Railfan & Railroad magazine.
Somerville, Massachusetts
Thursday June 14, 2018