Last Friday after dinner, we decided to take the girls out for a little treat. So as we sometimes do, we headed into Willimantic to visit our local Dairy Queen. Going there involves crossing the New England Central tracks, which is also where the Providence & Worcester now interchanges with the NECR. As we crossed the tracks at Bridge Street, I saw something interesting working in the yard. But of course, ice cream came first…
Heading over the Bridge Street grade crossing, I did my usual thing, and looked into the NECR’s yard to the south. But instead of the usual tracks and standing cars, I saw a pair of P&W engines down in the yard. Interesting – there was an NR-4X in town. But we kept our priorities straight and headed right for DQ (which was within sight of the crossing anyways).
With Blizzards in hand, we got back in the car and headed home. This time as we crossed over Bridge Street, the P&W power was sitting on the north side of the crossing – it looked like the crew was switching ends to head back east to Plainfield. Of course, I had no camera with me so we continued on our way home.
As we were heading up Route 289 towards home, I turned to my wife and asked quietly if she would mind if we tried to chase NR-4X back to Plainfield. She was fine with it so long as the girls were OK with the ride. Well, when I asked them if they’d like to go chase a train, their answer was “can we get our cameras?!” Well, that was the answer there – we made a quick stop at home to grab our camera gear, and headed back into Willimantic to try and catch the train.
I figured it was best to start out at the yard and work east to see if I could find them. So we drove by the yard – no sign of the P&W at all – but something odd caught my eye down in the yard – some weird looking cars, especially for Willimantic. I figured we could investigate further later on. So we continued east. Nothing that I could see down by the south end of the yard, and we sat at the Route 203 crossing in South Windham for a bit. Nothing at all. OK, let’s push further east – maybe they got out of town quicker than I thought.
We stopped at Scotland dam next – but again there was nothing in sight, earshot or within range of the scanner. So we hung out for a bit again, but were only met by sporadic raindrops hitting the roof of the car. With everything still, we headed back to Route 203 again for one final check.
With only the rain falling by Route 203, we decided to call it quits and head back home. But we did so through Willimantic again – I wanted to investigate those odd looking cars.
We pulled into the parking lot under the foot bridge in Willimantic, and parked. The girls were itching to take some pictures, so since the rain pretty much stopped, the three of us headed across the footbridge to check out those cars.
As we got on the footbridge, my suspicion was confirmed – it was a three well car with four containers on them – two singles and one double stack – sitting under the footbridge. Looks like there was an NR-4X called to run these guys down from Worcester.
So anyways, we all got a few photos of the stacks sitting in the yard, and chatted with another railfan for a bit before heading back to the car, and back home. Here’s my photos from our not-so-hot chase.
[cpg_album:600]Thanks for looking!
Tom
