I went to McAdam today with my two youngest kids to see the eastbound NB Southern freight. I had heard it would be in around 15:00 so I arranged to be there at 14:30. As I arrived, my cell phone rang and my contact told me that they might be up to two hours late. Great.
We went to the Family Restaurant in McAdam and had some ice cream and shared a coffee with a good friend. After that, I decided to head down to the border to see if I could catch the freight just after it crossed the border.
As I approached the border, I heard someone talking very clearly on the scanner, which told me the freight was close by. I decided to try to get him at the Highway 630 crossing. As I pulled up to the crossing, the lights were already flashing, so it was a quick grab shot into the sun.
The train was NBSR 9801, 2319, 2317, and 2318 with 21 cars.
I beat it back toward McAdam, taping him once from the side of the road, and I still got to the station ahead of him. Another shot into the sun as he arrived at 16:03.
They dropped the first four cars in the yard, then did a little dance with the MM&A boxcars at the pulp transload track. The four units ended up pushing two empty MM&A boxcars up to the transload boxcar before returning to their train. There was no pickup in McAdam, nor in Mattawamkeag for that matter.
My man Gary Lee kept a close eye on the switching.
One of the yellow units was smoking quite a bit.
I grabbed one more shot of them just before I (and they) left McAdam at 16:30.
We then drove to Harvey, easily beating them there while respecting the speed limit. I'm sure I spent 10 minutes there setting up the tripod and waiting for them to show up. They rolled through at 17:07 in the long, long shadows.
Not a bad day... too bad they were so late. The sun was too low to get really good pictures at the angles presented to me.
