The MALPM where it all began...
We all have our origin story in this hobby... for me, I "cut my teeth" railfanning in my hometown of Reedsburg, Wisconsin the mid-2000s, watching the tri-weekly Wisconsin and Southern local working the various industries in town. Reedsburg was the end of the branch from Madison, which was former the C&NW Route of the 400s, fallen from grace a bit. The MALPM (for Madison Area Local PM Job) ran as a turn three days a week - typically Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoon/evenings in this era.
There was many an evening where a horn for the South Dewey Avenue crossing a mile to the south of our home would be heard by my attentive ears, usually quickly followed by the words "Can we go watch the train?" And most of the time my very patient father would be kind enough to hop in the car with me and spend perhaps an hour watching the crews work Lakeside Canning, Hartje Lumber, and Pace Plastics, and very occasionally Midwest Hardwoods or the Reedsburg Co-op in Potash season. He'd usually bring the paper or a book to read or on some Sunday evenings we'd listen to the Sunday night "Game of the Week" baseball game on ESPN radio. Though as I recall every once and a while my dad would be the first one to yell through the house "the train's in town!" when that distant horn could be heard, so I suspect at least some of the time he must have enjoyed it himself... or perhaps he just enjoyed seeing me happy.
When we got our first (pretty cheap) digital cameras I started taking photos of course, but as a pre-teenager without much understanding of composition or much technical knowhow, most of the images from that era are best mostly for the memories. But this image is one I've always liked, of the WSOR 2052 on the MAPM 29 crossing Main Street (STH 33) on May 29, 2005. That's Downtown Reedsburg over the Baraboo River in the background left.
The standard power was a combination of either one or two GP38s or SD20s that the WSOR rostered at the time, and I was always glad to see the SD20s especially.
The crew may have been running up here to the end of the in-place track to service Lakeside Foods, a cannery that used to ship a lot of cars in canning season when I first started foaming. I think by this date their traffic was waning though, and so it's possible the crew was actually running up here so they could walk to the Kwik Trip a block away for lunch. That wasn't an uncommon occurrence... "to polish the rails" as the regular conductor once put it.
That continued until somewhere circa 2008 or 2009, when I can remember going home from school one day in the winter and finding a GP38 sitting derailed on one of the crossings just to the east of here... ice in the flange had gotten them as they made their lunch run! Shortly thereafter a red board went up by the depot to keep anything from going any further than needed to serve the active industries, and so I don't think anything has traveled over the pictured crossing in more than a decade now. When I was back to visit my folks a couple days before Christmas 2020, the crossing signals were being removed for this and several other crossings on the inactive track. While the east side of Reedsburg continues to be a busy traffic generator for the WSOR, it appears the days of trains running to the west side of Reedsburg are over, unfortunately. So I'm glad to have an image like this to remember it by at least.
The MALPM where it all began...
We all have our origin story in this hobby... for me, I "cut my teeth" railfanning in my hometown of Reedsburg, Wisconsin the mid-2000s, watching the tri-weekly Wisconsin and Southern local working the various industries in town. Reedsburg was the end of the branch from Madison, which was former the C&NW Route of the 400s, fallen from grace a bit. The MALPM (for Madison Area Local PM Job) ran as a turn three days a week - typically Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoon/evenings in this era.
There was many an evening where a horn for the South Dewey Avenue crossing a mile to the south of our home would be heard by my attentive ears, usually quickly followed by the words "Can we go watch the train?" And most of the time my very patient father would be kind enough to hop in the car with me and spend perhaps an hour watching the crews work Lakeside Canning, Hartje Lumber, and Pace Plastics, and very occasionally Midwest Hardwoods or the Reedsburg Co-op in Potash season. He'd usually bring the paper or a book to read or on some Sunday evenings we'd listen to the Sunday night "Game of the Week" baseball game on ESPN radio. Though as I recall every once and a while my dad would be the first one to yell through the house "the train's in town!" when that distant horn could be heard, so I suspect at least some of the time he must have enjoyed it himself... or perhaps he just enjoyed seeing me happy.
When we got our first (pretty cheap) digital cameras I started taking photos of course, but as a pre-teenager without much understanding of composition or much technical knowhow, most of the images from that era are best mostly for the memories. But this image is one I've always liked, of the WSOR 2052 on the MAPM 29 crossing Main Street (STH 33) on May 29, 2005. That's Downtown Reedsburg over the Baraboo River in the background left.
The standard power was a combination of either one or two GP38s or SD20s that the WSOR rostered at the time, and I was always glad to see the SD20s especially.
The crew may have been running up here to the end of the in-place track to service Lakeside Foods, a cannery that used to ship a lot of cars in canning season when I first started foaming. I think by this date their traffic was waning though, and so it's possible the crew was actually running up here so they could walk to the Kwik Trip a block away for lunch. That wasn't an uncommon occurrence... "to polish the rails" as the regular conductor once put it.
That continued until somewhere circa 2008 or 2009, when I can remember going home from school one day in the winter and finding a GP38 sitting derailed on one of the crossings just to the east of here... ice in the flange had gotten them as they made their lunch run! Shortly thereafter a red board went up by the depot to keep anything from going any further than needed to serve the active industries, and so I don't think anything has traveled over the pictured crossing in more than a decade now. When I was back to visit my folks a couple days before Christmas 2020, the crossing signals were being removed for this and several other crossings on the inactive track. While the east side of Reedsburg continues to be a busy traffic generator for the WSOR, it appears the days of trains running to the west side of Reedsburg are over, unfortunately. So I'm glad to have an image like this to remember it by at least.