News Article About Fords to Framingham

More information about Ford leaving Guilford for CSXT can be read here.

Morrison said that an organization called People of Ayer Concerned about the Environment, of which she was a member, sent letters to auto companies in 2004 urging them not to use Guilford's proposed unloading facility. Ford agreed that its vehicles would not be unloaded at that location and parked on the aquifer, Morrison said. She was unsure whether that issue might have factored into the company's decision to switch to CSX.

So PACE thinks they might have been instrumental in scaring Ford out of expanding auto-unloading capacity in Ayer. If the existing auto-unloading facility goes moribund, won't Ayer be deprived of real estate tax revenue, as GRS won't have to pay the same tax as if the property were active?

i read on a Yahoo group, CSX sightings, that starting tomorrow, Wed. 3/15, Q274 will go all the way to Framingham w/ loaded autoracks of Fords

The Multilevels are back at the CP yard in Framingham. I drove past the yard Saturday AM (3/18) and there were a dozen or so autoracks being unloaded. Good to see ML activity there again.

The new runs have been negotiated between Boston & Selkirk and the new schedules and run changes will take effect one week from Tuesday.

The Q293 will be Framingham crews on duty @ 500 hours, but I do not know about the Q283 because those were given to Selkirk. (It will probably continue to have a 300am report time, but not sure.)

Just out of curiosity, do the Framingham crews run between Selkirk and Framingham while the Selkirk crews run between Selkirk and Beacon Park? I often wondered why CSX runs light engines on trains like Q174 & Q264 all the way east to Beacon Park when they have no cars after Worcester & E Brookfield, respectively. That's ~ 50 miles with no payload running through commuter rail territory at a couple of bucks per gallon for fuel. Are there that many wb train starts leaving Beacon Park that these trains' locomotives couldn't be left in Worcester or Framingham? In the Conrail days, there were often Sunday afternoon wb light engine convoys out of Beacon Park. Is the garbage export business requiring more wb horsepower these days?

The Framingham freight (FR-SE, Q437) has always been a mixed-crew, Framingham Conductor and Selkirk engineer. That is changing with the new runs this week.

As for why Q174 runs lite to Boston from Worcester. 1) The power is usually the original power and has taken the train all the way from Jax. and therefore needs to be serviced. 2) The crews are either a Boston crew heading home or a Selkirk crew which reports for a train back out of Boston. Q264's power usually terminates in Framingham. As for lite engine moves on Sundays, there used to be a lite engine move on Sundays until a few years ago when Jax told the trainmaster that she had to run it as a train, which they now run as a Q117.

Trash is a very large industry on the railroad, but the trash out of Boston is still being put on Q421 (BO-SE). Supposedly the trash company at Beacon Park wanted to have a unit train and pay for the power and crews but CSXT said "No" even though the trash people said that if they had a unit train they could produce enough to justify it.

I could have sworn that CSXT was at least up until recently running a solid unit garbage train out of Boston for Allied/BFI, something like K295??

yes K295 is/was the trash train saw it several times last year on the mohawk.also understand it went down the river line on occasion.

I never heard who it was for, but it may have been for BFI as opposed to the guy at Beacon Park's normal operation, not sure. And yes, K295 usually hooked a left-hand turn at CP-SK and headed south on the River Line without even going into Selkirk Yard.

The COFC Garbage/MSW move out of Beacon Park has been for Allied/BFI from the get go almost 10 years ago. Allied/BFI was also shipping MSW out of W Springfield for the past 3-4 years but that ended recently and may be the reason why I believe K295 has been annulled and the Boston loads are run on the regular Q train, which I believe is Q 420/421.

I used Microsoft's http://local.live.com web site to get a bird's eye view of CSX's CP yard south of Framingham and discovered there's a 13 track yard south of the multilevel unloading area (it's an impossible place to access by road)! No wonder CSX uses it occasionally to originate freights to Selkirk.

The last of north-western tracks were removed a few years ago.

There are basically five tracks used. The Main, tracks 40,42,44 & 46.