P&W NR-3 in Norwich, and NECR 610 in Willimantic

Well, somewhat similiar to Wednesday, I ended up catching a couple trains – there was one Providence & Worcester, and one New England Central. The only difference was it was a different P&W train I caught, in a different location.

Well, another busy morning at work kept me from my usual morning walk. So I figured I’d head out for lunch to see what I could get. I had to head out to the bank anyways, so I decided to head a little more north, possibly in search of P&W train NR-3. Well, as I headed north, I got the answer I was looking for. NR-3 was working the Dow Chemical plant in Ledyard, and reported to the dispatcher that they had another 20-30 minutes of work before they headed north.

Now that the cold front had come through, the air dried out, and the haze of the past couple days has gone away, so longer telephoto shots were once again workable. So I headed for Norwich Harbor at the northernmost limit of the Thames River. I got to the Chelsea Landing park well ahead of the train, so I took advantage and walked around the park a bit. There were quite a few fishermen about, and a few folks sitting on the benches passing the lunch hour away. I only got one “do you work for the paper?” questions today. 🙂

A minute later, I could hear a rumble to the south – NR-3 was approaching, so I headed for the docks and got a shot as they passed by an old facotry to the south.

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A quick move to the other end of the dock (carefully, of course – don’t want to fall in!), and I switched to the wider lens for the next couple shots.

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And NR-3 was gone as fast as they came. So it was back to work, with a quick stop at McD’s for some on-the-road lunch.

Fast forward to this afternoon. After work, I had to head to BJ’s in Willimantic. On my way up Route 32, right about when I got into Franklin, the scanner woke up. The NECR dispatcher was giving a track warrant to what should have been NECR train #610, presumably in Willimantic – it was a work between MP32, which is just north of Bridge Street, and the north yard limits of New London.

As I got into Willimantic, I started hearing voices across the scanner, but by the time I got to the Frog Bridge they were still too distant to be working in the yard, which meant they were probably working the CC Lonsbury & Willi Waste area. So I shot up Route 66 to check it out. Yep, there they were, backing into the Willimantic Waste facility (the old steel mill to the north of Lonsbury) with a trio of NECR blue & gold geeps for power.

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Sure beats the beaters I shot on Wednesday. 😉

Since it sounded like they were going to be there for a bit, I headed to BJ’s to finish my errand. Once I got out of there and back into the car, I couldn’t hear anything over the scanner – no chatter and no marker. Hopefully they were still in the yard. So it was down Main Street for me. As I got to the Bridge Street intersection, sitting right there was my answer – 610 was stretched across the crossing, blocking up traffic as they were preparing to head south out of the yard. So quick ride down to the Frog Bridge was in order.

A quick walk up the bridge, and I did my through-the-chain link fence shot

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Then as they pulled out, I got a couple shots of the trio of EMDs crossing the bridge spanning the Willimantic River

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As the train continued to roll south, I headed back to the car, packed the gear away, and drove the remaining 5 minutes home.

Thanks for looking!
Tom