Rusty Crusty Calais

The second train I chased intentionally after moving to the decaying state of Maine in 2023 was the NBM railways Woodland Job. Known as the 505, the job purely exists to serve the Woodland pulp mill on the Eastern Border of Maine with NB near the town of Calais. The line from Calais to Woodland runs along the St. Croix river and criss-crosses the border, close enough where border patrol questioned what we were doing while taking photos on US soil during this day.

 

Now it isn't exactly a "chase" - if anything it's the most painfully slow train you can follow in the state. For whatever reason, they run at roughly 5 miles an hour over the course of the entire trip. You could keep up with this train on your hands and knees.

 

The Irving family of railroads loves their GMTX lease units like most Eastern shortline railroads, and this job usually gets one. For this day we got the unit that had affectionately earned the name "shit nose" from my friends, a locomotive that looks like it was nosed into a salt shed for half of its life. However this thing may have gotten its rusty nose, I thought it was kinda neat.

 

Here the unit is seen pulling a good sized drag of fresh logs interchanged from the Canadian side from train 506, along the section of the line to Woodland that once was the eastern end of the MEC's Calais branch. It's silly to call this line a branch as it ran across the entire eastern half of central Maine, but this is the final piece in operation.

 

Right up along the river makes for a nice frame just outside of Calais, and while it may not be the Harvest Yellow or Forest Green ALCos and EMDs of the past that ran here, shit nose was enough to make a good photo in my opinion.

Done