This week I was called again for the Spring Street turn from Dickinson to Spring Street yard in Charleston. With thermos of coffee in hand, I signed in at the yard office where our engineer Fred had already pulled our motive power up to as shown below. I grabbed our clearance card, waybills, and train orders and we proceeded to pull our caboose out of the caboose track also shown below. Today we’ll have an ex-NYC transfer caboose:
After leaving our caboose on the ladder, we pulled back up to track four where our train was waiting, put together by the third trick yard crew. Today we mostly had cars destined for Nitro, but also one for Armitage Furniture and several for the Valley turn. Below are photos I snapped of our consist:
I always like these early morning runs, when everything and everyone starts to stir, when the air is still cool from overnight, when the dew is still covering the grass. Every so often we’ll catch some deer along the railroad as we head towards Charleston, as we did this morning. After another uneventful trip, we are seen here arriving at Spring Street:
After dropping our cars in the yard, we took a break for lunch over at Sam and Mickey’s across from the yard. The Nitro job had already brought up our cars headed back to Dickinson, and was waiting in the clear on the service track:
After lunch, we proceeded to make up our outbound train with an empty SOO Line boxcar plus tank cars from Nitro. After the Nitro job tied on our caboose, we departed for Dickinson yard. Another days work on the Penn Central…..
